IT was Seaham Harbour to the rescue when North-East ensemble actor Paul Hamilton suddenly found himself thrust into a major Royal Shakespeare Company role for King Lear. His birthplace came in useful when he needed a regional accent to move from understudy to Kent following the unfortunate accident on stage which put Darrell D’Silva in hospital.

“Whatever happens there will always be a show on that night and it was quite a tragic incident. Something went wrong and there’s an inquiry going on and the police had to be called and everything because this was a firearms offence. One of the guns that was being used, a blank firing gun but still had an explosive charge in, went off and Darrell was using it and it took a big chunk of his finger off and there was blood spurting everywhere, so he was rushed to hospital. Consequently he had surgery and couldn’t play Kent.

“Because of the understudy system I was able to step in pretty quickly.”

Hamilton said everything had gone up in the air because D’Silva’s main role was Antony “and that was the one he had to concentrate on getting back up. So he started doing that in a sling and is now without it, but it was nice for me to get this good part and a good part for a Northerner because Shakespeare deliberately says that Kent will disguise himself and ‘other accents borrow’.”

He points out that with the two or three year length of RSC contracts it usually means that understudies are required.

“You have the full cast when you have a press night and you’ll often find on the next night it will be a thinner cast,” jokes Hamilton.

“It used to be years and years ago when the licensing laws shut the pubs at 10.30 or 11 when they’d kick everybody out apart from the actors because we’d only got there at 10.30 and we were allowed to stay until they decided to close. So that was very civilized,” he recalls.

Hamilton is looking forward to returning to the North-East and he feels it is very different to when he works in London because a lot of the audiences are tourists. “As such you never know what you are going to get when you go out, while in Newcastle the good thing is that when you visit the Theatre Royal you’re playing the city’s theatre and you’re it’s guest.

“Here (in Stratford) it’s the other way round where we’re the hosts to people who are here for two or three days. Newcastle people go to theatre on a regular basis and so it’s up to us to do a good job for them,”

says Hamilton, whose mother still leaves in Seaham.

He jokes about his mother telling him that the newspapers put his age in stories.

“I was 53 and the story said ‘Paul Hamilton, 53’ and she said ‘what did they put your age in for?’ and she was really upset.”

Sadly he won’t be commuting between Newcastle and Seaham because the actor likes to use public transport. “A lot of people say this, but I find that if you’ve lived by the sea you do find you miss it, which sounds rather sentimental, and I don’t mean that. But there’s definitely something missing when I’m not there,”

Hamilton says.

He got into acting via a band in Sunderland and met a girl who’d attended Grammar School – “and I didn’t really know they existed” – and then he went to drama school. Before that he’d done all sorts and not really thought about a career.

“I worked in garages and on building sites and in nursing homes. I was 17 and just went from job to job, but nothing artistic, and I was 22 when I went to drama school in Yorkshire (Bretton Hall),”

explains Hamilton who went on to theatre jobs in Nottingham and London.

The massive expense of travelling to London, where most auditions took place, meant he ended up living there.

“I ended up getting married and I’ve been there now for 20 years. It wasn’t my plan but it was how it worked out. As you’ll probably know there’s a big Northern circle of actors in London,” adds Hamilton who jests about not becoming the official RSC tour guide during the current season “but willing to sit at the back and translate the questions”.

Hamilton has earned some good reviews for his cameo of Diomedes in Anthony And Cleopatra.

“Well it’s a comedy part which is all well and good and sometimes it can be the worst part because in a tragedy on some nights it’s not going to work. And when it’s not working you don’t really know from the applause... when you have a comedy part it’s obvious when it’s not working and you may have a few gags but no one is laughing. But, touch wood, it’s been all right and all part of the story. A lot of times in Shakespeare the comedy is not all from the text, whereas this is comedy that Shakespeare wrote.

“There’s always a silver lining and the one good thing that’s come out of this is that every time someone pulls out a gun in this everybody on stage is aware... there is an accidental positive side to this.”