Shrew’d thinking (From The Northern Echo)

Shrew’d thinking

4:49pm Tuesday 21st February 2012 in Entertainment By Viv Hardwick

HOW did North-East-born actor Tom Berish take to spending all his time in bed for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest version of The Taming Of The Shrew?

The RSC’s latest young recruit laughs because director Lucy Bailey has set the whole production in a giant marital bed, which will literally cover the stage of Newcastle Theatre Royal for two weeks from Thursday.

“It was quite the opposite,” he says. “We were told it was going to be energetic, with a lot of physical stuff.”

Berish’s main role of Petruchio’s servant means he takes part in a great deal of the play’s knockabout scenes.

“I do take a bit of a battering, but it’s all in a day’s work and we do have a great fight director in Terry King,” he says.

But in answer to a question about every scene going to script, Berish pauses.

“Umm, we did have an accident early in the run, but that wasn’t to do with the fighting. I wasn’t involved, but one of the cast tripped and broke her ankle. It shook us all a bit, but we bounced back. The actress did a heroic job and kept going,” he says.

A quick search on the internet reveals that Aicha Kossoko had to drop out of the ensemble following her on-stage injury.

“There’s a great deal of camaraderie and the show has been a great hit with audiences.

You can do a version of the play where Petruchio is a brutal tyrant who subjugates this woman, but this production has a more warmth to it,” says Berish.

He feels that Bailey’s concept of Petruchio (played by David Caves, who toured in Stones in his Pockets) being a lost soul works well with the plot of him becoming a sparring lover with the bad-tempered Kate (Lisa Dillon, best-known as Mary Smith in BBC1’s Cranford).

He’d set his sights on joining the RSC after years of residencies on Tyneside. “It was always one of the main theatrical events and I was lucky enough to attend performances from the age of 14. Greg Doran’s Much Ado About Nothing and Greg Hicks’ Coriolanus were ones I really loved and gave me something to aspire to,”

Berish says. Having come through the famous Cambridge Footlights, while studying English at the university, Berish switched to drama and studied at The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) before being invited to join the RSC. The tour of The Shrew marks his first professional performance in his home city.

“It’s fantastic to be coming back to the place I grew up and playing in front of people who I began learning to act with.

Students from my school (King’s, in Tynemouth) are coming one night and my old drama and English teachers,” says the actor, who was born in Sunderland, but grew up in South Shields and Newcastle.

Berish feels it was his King’s teacher, Brian Green, who gave him the acting bug at 16, while being invited to play Hamlet at Cambridge in 2005 made up his mind to become an actor. “I thought maybe I should think about it as a career, particularly after I played Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Luckily, I was already in love with Hamlet because it was the first Shakespeare I did in Tynemouth and I was Horatio in a school production.

“In fact the guy who played Hamlet in that school production is also an actor.

His name is Andrew Calvert and he and I were lost in admiration when we went to see the RSC. So it’s been a long-term ambition...

in terms of a very short career.”

• The Taming Of The Shrew, Newcastle Theatre Royal, until March 3. Box office 08448-112-121 or theatreroyal.co.uk