A SOAP opera star has announced "I don't feel well" before collapsing on stage as he was performing at one of the leading theatres in the North.

John McArdle, who is best known for playing Billy Corkhill in Brookside alongside Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston, and Ronnie Hale in 116 episodes of Emmerdale fell to the ground during a performace at York Theatre Royal this evening.

When the actor, who played Sam Harper in Spender and has appeared in Heartbeat, Foyle's War, Cracker, Casualty and Waking The Dead, collapsed other members of the cast gathered round him and the curtain was brought down. His condition is not known.

The performance had only been running for about 15 minutes on the main stage and much of the auditorium was filled.

At 8.05pm, the theatre management announced that the rest of the performance had been cancelled saying that Mr McArdle had been "taken ill".

The 68-year-old, who starred in TV show Mersey Beat in 2001 and in and Prime Suspect 5: Errors of Judgement, was playing the part of Bob Price in Andrew Bovell's Things I Know to Be True when he collapsed.

The show was near the half-way point of a ten-theatre tour.

He last appeared at the Theatre Royal in 2014 when, in the 30th anniversary of the Miners' Strike, he played Danny in Brassed Off, the play set around a brass band in a Yorkshire mining village.

Tonight's production was the second in the week-long run in the city of Things I Know to Be True, a joint production between A Frantic Assembly and State Theatre Company of South Australia.