Royal Shakespeare Company actor Adam Rayner has survived a blow to the head which required six stitches to make his debut on Tyneside as the firebrand Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. He talks to Viv Hardwick about dancing way into the Newcastle season.

RISING young Royal Shakespeare Company actor Adam Rayner bursts into a big smile when he discovers that his North-East connections have him rubbing shoulders with Prospero-playing Patrick Stewart for the Tyneside Season interviews.

"That's really why I'm here," he jokes having been promoted above his Romeo and Juliet co-stars Rupert Evans and Morven Christie, who are finding it a little difficult to discuss their roles with the press, having fallen in love in real life as well.

Rayner, who attended Durham University and has an embarrassing story about working as a model in Newcastle to tell, has been wheeled out instead to discuss his role of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, plus Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing and an English Herald in King John.

"I was studying English literature at Durham and left in 1999 and it was a fantastic place, but it took some getting used to because I didn't really realise what the title college meant in relation to university. I went along from my rural comprehensive in Norfolk and I wasn't really prepared for all the public school types. It was a bit of a shock because I didn't know they existed.

"I got used to it and made some great friends and there's an active student theatre. I got more and more involved and that led me to think about going to drama school," he explains, adding that he took the success or failure of his application to drama school to decide his future.

His route into modelling resulted from his volunteering to take part in the university's annual student fashion show. "Being a terrible show-off, I couldn't resist the temptation to model. As a result I was signed up to this shady Newcastle modelling agency for whom I didn't work a great deal but one of the jobs I did was to attend a ridiculous photo shoot and it ended up being an advert for the 24-hour Oxford to London bus service. Eighteen months later I was on one of the red buses in London and I looked up and saw this terrible advert and remember thinking 'out of all the adverts I've looked at, that is the worst' and 'that guy in it looks like such an idiot' and only then did I realise that it was me," says Rayner, who realised that the tone of the commercial was 'even if you look at ridiculous as this guy if you use the Oxford tube-bus you stand a chance of picking up a decent girlfriend'.

"That didn't do a great deal for my career," he admits ruefully.

Thankfully, what is changing his acting focus is the famously angry young man of Tybalt in the Nancy Meckler-directed Romeo and Juliet which adds an element of Stomp to the Italian feuding families by using wooden staves in dance-choreographed fights.

So had he been a dancer before taking on the role? "No, it was a bit of a shock, you do all this stage combat at drama school, drill and drill and drill in sword-fighting and when you finally get to play this famous fighting character they hand you a pair of tap shoes," he says.

HE had done some 'messing about' dance and admits he's never thought of a career in musical theatre before. "While at sword-fighting I was a number one student but it only goes to show you," Rayner grumbles in semi-serious manner about using a longstaff which actually turned out to be more dangerous than a stage sword.

"I can show you a wonderful DVD that is lying around of me getting six stitches in my eyebrow in the final run we did in Clapham when Rupert and I got too close to each other and he smacked me in the head. In fact, it did a lot more damage than a sword would have done. So there is real danger and the thing is you don't have the same discipline as you do in combat because you're dancing and the rules of distance are always drilled into you when the swords come out. That was the last time anything went wrong but there's ten of us on stage twirling sticks every night," he says.

The steps have come from Liz Rankin, a founder member of contemporary dance company DV8, and Rayner has spoken to audience members who found the noisy choreography 'not dangerous at all' to others who say it represents the danger better than a proper fight ever could. So opinion is divided.

"Whether you think it works or not, it's very clever choreography and it took a long time to learn and we are quite passionate about how it fits into the show. But it's up to the audience, ultimately, to decide if it works or not," he says, but accepts that there has been no attempt to link the Italian setting of Verona with the English nature of the staves.

"So there's Robin Hood and longstaffs with clog dancing and the Italian element coming together," Rayner adds.

This RSC version also performs its fights and suicides without a drop of fake blood being spilled - a rare event for the company in recent years.

"You go one way or the other. If you've got realistic fighting with swords then you need blood, if you've got figurative fighting and then have blood then you're mixing your metaphors. It was discussed quite a lot but in the end we decided it was a bad idea," he says.

* Romeo and Juliet runs from November 13-18 at Newcastle's Theatre Royal. Box Office: 0870-905-5060.