Actor Giles Roberts says playing the Danish prince was one of his great ambitions. He tells Steve Pratt why.

HAMLET is on a bus when we speak on the phone. Actor Giles Roberts is on a break in the theatre tour of the Shakespeare play and gearing up to a week of rehearsals before hitting the road again and heading for, among other places, Harrogate and Middlesbrough.

“We’d been going for a couple of months and just as we got up a head of steam on the tour we had a break for Christmas. I’m looking forward to going back,” he says.

He’s at ease playing Shakespeare’s troubled Danish prince now in contrast to early days in the role. “For the first couple of weeks I was wetting myself every night before going on.

Now I know what I’m doing,” he says.

Hamlet is one of those must-do classical roles to which many, most perhaps, actors aspire. So when he was working for Icarus Theatre Collective – which is presenting the national tour with Harrogate Theatre – on a previous production, he became aware that Hamlet was in the pipeline. “So I thought I’d stay in touch and keep myself in the loop for when they started the auditions process,” he says.

Five auditions later, he won the role in a production which director Max Lewendel describes as “surreal, extreme and like a nightmare exploding out of Hamlet’s mind and onto the stage”.

Roberts succeeded in his aim of getting Hamlet.

“There are illusions of him being about 30 and I’m around that age. It’s always been something I’ve wanted to play. It’s such a wonderful role, I hope to get another opportunity to do it.

But it’s one I can tick off the list. It takes me back to Uncle Monty in Withnail And I who says you reach an age and realise you never played the Dane.”

During the break in the tour he took the opportunity to go and see another Hamlet – Rory Kinnear at London’s National Theatre. “He’s been doing it since September and I opted not to go while we were rehearsing. They set it in the modern day with tracksuits and hoodies.

Ours is more traditional, but not ruffs and big sleeves. Ours is supposed to be in Denmark itself.”

“It’s a big play but our production is being done modestly. It could be done even more modestly – all you need is actors and the text, a stretcher for Ophelia’s body and swords for the duel.”

Ask Roberts, who is three years out of drama school, to describe his Hamlet and he tells how each actor playing the role tends to have an adjective attached to sum up his approach. David Tennant’s recent RSC one, for instance, was the Manic Hamlet. Another was called the Mad Hamlet. Robert is the Physical Hamlet.

“He’s quite physical, that’s the way I like to approach a part. It’s a very physical production, from the gut. And there are aspects that you assume will be there, like the manicness.”

Surprisingly, he’d never seen the play on stage before tackling the role. He did watch Tennant in the TV version of his RSC production, but points out that was very different to a stage performance.

The play contains more than its fair share of famous speeches which can be a stumbling block for an actor when approaching the familiar words.

“Taking one of those iconic monologues you’re afraid you might be shot down in flames.

It’s the fact that you’re on stage alone and have no one to bounce off. That’s when any actor is most vulnerable.

“I’ve managed to work the speeches in as the story, but they can come out of the play and sit alone.”

There has been some tinkering with the order. “We’ve done something with To Be Or Not To Be, moved the speech from its original place to slap bang in the middle of the show.”

His previous Shakespeare roles include Mercutio in Romeo And Juliet, a character more interesting, he feels, than the star-crossed lover in the title. “I recently saw the play at the Roundhouse and in that Mercutio is a joker. It’s all in the text. Shakespeare is such an amazing writer you can do what you want with the text as long as you’re committed to it.”

The Bard of Avon was more or less responsible for Roberts wanting to train to be an actor.

He went to university to study for a degree in marketing, but came to realise that’s not what he wanted to do. His mind went back to playing Sebastian in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at school when he was 14. “I remember thinking, ‘that’s fun, I’ll give that a go’.”

His ambition is a practical one – to get noticed.

“I feel fortunate to be playing in the theatre and working in a paid job for six months,”

he says. “Your parents want you to get something to fall back on, but the moment you have that is the same moment you lose focus as an actor.”

Next week’s five-day run at Harrogate Theatre is a treat because most of the tour dates are one or two-nighters. “We can finish the show and have a drink instead of dismantling the set and leaving,” he explains.

The size of venues the tour is playing varies wildly. He recalls that at the arts centre in Swindon, the stage was half the size expected. They only put up half the set and had to reblock the moves 45 minutes before curtain-up.

Touring with a small company also means that everyone helps out with all the backstage work. For Roberts, that means looking after the costumes. “Hamlet does the laundry,” he says.

* Harrogate Theatre: February 1-5. Tickets 01423-502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk; Middlesbrough Theatre: February 28 and March 1. Tickets 01642-815181 or middlesbrough.gov.uk/entertainment