'My mother treats me like a holy relic'

Newry actor Sean Kearns is not from a theatrical background and was turned down by every drama school he applied to - but as he begins a second season at the Royal Shakespeare Company, he finds he has been joined by a largely Irish creative team, he tells Jane Coyle

IT IS EARLY summer in Stratford-upon-Avon and the boys from Co Armagh are out in force. Many of the town's perennially familiar tourist sights are in evidence - the swans afloat on the grey-green waters of the bloated river, queues outside Shakespeare's birthplace and Anne Hathaway's cottage - but down in Bancroft Gardens there is a sense of minor confusion in the air, as a result of what the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is poetically referring to as the "transformation" of its iconic home on the banks of the Avon.

In Stratford, town life and theatre life are indivisible. For all the disruption caused by cranes and diggers tearing the heart out of the ugly/lovely 1930s brown-brick Royal Shakespeare Theatre, there is no question that the show must go on.

Undaunted by the closure of both its main house and the adjacent Swan Theatre, in the original 19th-century Victorian Gothic building, the RSC is operating out of the Courtyard, an Elizabethan-style playhouse with thrust stage, which is providing a working prototype for the massive new 1,000-seater auditorium due for completion in 2010.

The current season comprises Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Veniceand Conall Morrison's controversial revival of The Taming of the Shrew, arguably the most problematic of Shakespeare's comedies, staged here to great visual effect by a largely Irish creative team.

In the cast of both The Shrew and The Merchant are John-Paul Connolly - like Morrison a native of Armagh city - Seán Kearns from nearby Newry and Dublin's Patrick Moy. Connolly and Moy are making their debuts with the company, while 42-year-old Kearns has been signed for a second season, which, as well as the roles of Hortensio and the Prince of Aragon, also involves the heavy responsibility of understudying the lead roles of Petruchio and Shylock.

"When Conall first got us together, I looked around the room," Kearns recalls. "We are a very youth-heavy company and I just knew that I was going to be asked to understudy both those massive roles. How did I feel? Absolutely thrilled. Having one-to-one voice classes with Cicely Berry and extra movement and dance classes has been brilliant. It has helped me extend my craft.

"This season, they have revived the tradition of the understudy run, which will include a public run of The Merchant of Venice. So, whatever else may or may not happen in my career, I can always say that I played Shylock for the Royal Shakespeare Company."

KEARNS HAD HIS sights set on an acting career while he was a pupil at the Abbey Grammar School in Newry. In common with many aspiring young actors from that neck of the woods, he attributes his success to the influence of the late Seán Hollywood, a teacher at St Colman's College and the inspirational director of the Newpoint Players. He laughingly admits that, as a large, shy, slightly gauche 16-year-old, he was hardly the standard stuff of matinee idols.

"On the surface, I was certainly rather unpromising. But Seán himself was unconventional, a bit of a maverick," says Kearns. "He relished breaking the mould, going against the grain, and he saw the prospect of getting the best out of an enthusiastic, raw young kid like me as a challenge.

"The first show I did with him was Habeas Corpus, then One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, followed by a raft of great plays around the amateur drama festival circuit.

"There are lots of us who owe a huge debt of gratitude to Seán - John, Susan and Pauline Lynch, Gerard Murphy, Peter Ballance, to name just a few."

Another early mentor was former Ulster Youth Theatre director Michael Poynor.

"Poynor made me the disciplined person I am today," he says. "We did a different musical every year and we trained and rehearsed as though our lives depended on it. It was through those musicals that I first came to dance, and it's a love that has never left me.

"Poynor used to boast that his casts were fitter than any rugby team. He put us through hell, but if he said 'jump!', we said 'how high?' Those rehearsals made you psychologically aware of who you were and, to this day, although I'm a big bloke, I see myself as having no particular size."

In The Shrew, Kearns plays the middle-aged, eternally hopeful suitor, Hortensio, with an endearingly light comic touch. And, although he isn't credited, he also choreographed some of the dance sequences. Morrison's interpretation focuses on a crucial word in the play's title, placing relentless emphasis on the "taming" of Michelle Gomez's haughty, temperamental thoroughbred, Kate, by Stephen Boxer's brutish Petruchio.

Critics have praised the production's breakneck pace, its no-holds-barred physical comedy and its sparky, energetic performances. But some have baulked at the darkness and violence of the second act, in which Kate is broken in body and spirit by a spouse who revels in his domination of her. The production includes the sometimes omitted scenes of Christopher Sly's induction, a drunken, debauched stag night at the end of which the groom-to-be is visited by a group of travelling actors, who drag him into the cast of their politically incorrect play.

"It's a very nasty play," observes Kearns. "There's no getting away from that. There has to be a reason for doing a play in 2008 that is 400 years old and has such difficult subject matter. Conall's take on it is misogynistic and presents a man who is hell-bent on eradicating in a woman the very thing that attracted him to her in the first place. It's impossible to make sense of it if you leave out Sly's induction, the play within a play, the game of deceit and double identity.

"Anyway, we must be making a decent fist of it because we've just found out that it's going into the West End. It will be my first time performing there and I'm incredibly excited at the prospect."

FOR MANY YEARS Kearns was a regular presence on the Northern stage, but for some time now his work base has been Dublin. It is a situation that both enriches and takes its toll on family life.

"The reason I've been working more and more in Dublin is that there has not been the work in Belfast to sustain or interest me," he says. "You get a bit tired of being 'the big friend of somebody or other'. I'm not complaining, but people stop seeing you as anything except a type or a shape. I've had opportunities in Dublin to play some fantastic characters that I would never have been considered for at home. I was in Conall's all-male The Importance of Being Earnest, playing Miss Prism, with Patrick Moy and then Marty Rea as Cicely. It's been lovely coming to the RSC with no baggage and nothing to do but the gig.

"Gillian and Caitlin are incredibly generous about my long absences, but they acknowledge that this is what I do. If I don't work, the mortgage doesn't get paid. They come and see me whenever they can. Mine is far from being a theatrical family, and when I'm down in Newry my mother tends to treat me like a holy relic and talk about me in hushed tones. But they are all so supportive.

"Caitlin loves to travel and take in different experiences. She grew up during Robin Midgley's reign at the Lyric in Belfast - she was born just as I started rehearsals for The Sound of Music. It was a warm, welcoming place then, where everybody brought their babies. As a result, she thinks she has a divine right to be backstage at any show she sees!

"They've visited me a few times in Stratford. It's a beautiful place, though it can sometimes feel a bit like living in a theme park. But I've had so many great one-off opportunities, like singing in the parish church for Shakespeare's birthday celebrations. So far in my career, I've had the most fantastic time - which makes me sound as though I'm on my last legs! But getting a second season here has taken things up a notch. I'm soon going to be doing seven weeks of projects and workshops, before starting work on a new play with the company's artistic director, Michael Boyd. That will take me up to March 2009, which is unheard-of in this profession.

"I didn't go to drama school; I got turned down by every college in the country, year after year. Sometimes, when I'm walking along a corridor and I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, wearing my street clothes, I have to stop and think, 'yes it's me, that guy from Newry - and I'm at the RSC'."

• The Taming of the Shrewruns in Stratford until the end of September, before transferring to London