THE most explosive Shakespearean entry of all time must go to North-East actor Antony Byrne who will surprise and delight Newcastle audiences when Pistol bursts onto the stage in Henry IV Part II with smoke pouring from a massive head of hair.

“Well, we do add a bit of hair in, just a bit. It’s been good fun all of that and throughout my career I’ve kept coming back to this company. I had an idea of how I wanted Pistol to look and had a chat with the designer and showed him some pictures of Don McCullen’s images from Whitechapel of down and outs from the 1970s. Pirates of the Caribbean also had an influence,” says Bryne, who roars with laughter when I dub the production Beardgate.

“I always seem to get a seat on the train, which is interesting,” says the actor who plays the madcap friend of Falstaff in Part II having come to a sticky end as rebellious Worcester in Henry IV Part 1.

“All I can say is, ‘Thank you Greg Doran for helping out in terms of that explosion of bringing that character on stage. It’s a bit of a gift really. Pistol is fun and he’s dark as well and always after the main chance.”

Byrne is from Whitley Bay, but confesses he’s never appeared on stage at the recently-restored Playhouse in his home town. “God, I remember going to see things like The Gang Show many years ago and I was really jealous when it had Dexy’s Midnight Runners last year and I saw that the band had re-emerged from nowhere and were at the Playhouse. I couldn’t get up there because I was working,” he says.

There was no theatrical background to his family, but Byrne always wanted to tread the boards. “The Royal Shakespeare Company have always been important to me. When I was a teenager I remember the RSC had a touring unit and I recall going to Newbiggin and watching Much Ado about Nothing with Nigel Terry, Fiona Shaw and Paul Rees and then there was The Merchant Of Venice as a double bill. I also remember going to Newcastle Theatre Royal and seeing Romeo and Juliet with Michael Kitchen as Mercutio and it was a Michael Bogdarnof production and the company brought a Ferrari on stage. Kitchen was playing an electric guitar and he jumped off a balcony into a swimming pool. You look at that and think, ‘I’ll have a little bit of that please’. I think that was in the early 1980s,” says Byrne who also watched productions at Northern Stage’s Gulbenkian Theatre.

“I remember lots of experimental stuff going on and you’d find people from university trying stuff out. It was quite alive, but I was lucky because I went to drama school at a time when North Tyneside Council gave you funding and allowed you to train to be an actor. I’d found through people that I knew there was a drama group up at Backworth near Shiremoor and people like Max Roberts (artistic director of Live Theatre) was there. There was a whole group of people who ended up going into the profession,” he says.

Byrne feels that his desire to be an actor carried him through the leap required from North-East youth group to Stratford stages.

“I was going to go to university and took a year out, but decided on an acting course instead and I don’t know why but I only wanted to apply to the Central School (of Acting) and ended up doing three years. The change in terms of acting training has been massive, but at that time the school was very small and it wasn’t about academic qualifications. A couple of people on my course were very dyslexic and I wondered over the years how well they would have sat in the framework of a degree course, but that’s the way the world is now. Now, people have to fund themselves and there’s 95m courses available,” he says.

Byrne reveals he has been asked to do things in the region but this never seems to have worked out.

“I was up in the North-East about five years ago doing a workshop for Northern Stage where we were looking at David Almond’s Fire-eaters with a notion of doing that, but nothing came of that. It’s a brilliant book and I did Skellig for him the first time it was performed on stage at The Young Vic. David came down and was just brilliant. I said to him that I’d bought his first collection of short stories when I was up in Necastle and I was spouting back some of the first lines.

“I told him I’d given the book to an old girlfriend, as you do, and he very sweetly said, ‘I’ve got a shelf-full of them back at home. So, he brought me a copy and signed it for me.”

Byrne, sadly, can’t see himself ever moving back to the region even though his father and brother still live there. “I’ve also got friends who are really important to me, and who I see every time I visit. They are coming to see the RSC plays and I’m going to be stopping with my dad because it’s always nice to catch up.

“In this brave new world of Skype there’s few surprises even when it comes to my current bearded look which makes me look like a mountain man.”

Henry IV Parts I & II runs from Thu 25 Sep to Sat 4 Oct. Box Office: 08448-112-121 theatreroyal.co.uk