Steve Pratt talks to Heather Dutton, who is taking part in Dark Horse Theatre’s first national tour with a production of Sing Something Simple

WASHINGTON-BORN actress Heather Dutton’s audition for Dark Horse Theatre’s world premiere tour of Sing Something Simple was an unusual one. She didn’t even know she was auditioning for writer-director Vanessa Brooks.

“I met Vanessa not with anything in mind,” she says. “She was just meeting actors to see who she might like to work with. We had a really great one-hour chat, and I did my piece and played my violin.

“A couple of weeks later she said she’d like me to play this role in a production she’d mentioned.

She wrote it and put quite a bit of me into it.”

One of the things Brooks picked up from the audition concerned Dutton’s karaoke exploits.

She asked if the actress had a song she always did. “Well, I always do a full version of Bohemian Rhapsody. I was reading the script and, lo and behold, it was there.”

Sing Something Simple is the first national tour from Huddersfield-based Dark Horse (formerly Full Body & The Voice). The show is integrated, meaning it features non-learning disabled actors alongside one of Dark Horse’s learning disabled actors.

The play follows an everyday family battling modern and topical preoccupations with fame, fortune and what it really means to make it to the top. The title, as older readers will recall, was the name of a legendary BBC Radio 2 show featuring the Cliff Adams Singers. One of the characters in the play was a session singer with the group and his two grandsons are expected to follow him. But one of them has a problem – he can’t sing a note.

Dutton plays next-door neighbour Bonnie, who’s very close to the non-singing brother.

“They’re best mates. She likes food, dresses up in silly clothes and fancies the pants off Spencer’s brother Kit.”

As well as performing her karaoke song, Dutton gets to play the violin, an instrument this daughter of two music teachers began playing when she was very young. At 15, she was playing in an orchestra in and around Newcastle.

Then she let it lie for a while as “the Bigg Market and all of that were more important at the time”. She also plays the ukulele and mandolin so belongs to that very employable band of performers who can call themselves actormusicians.

“I’m one of those people who knew they wanted to be the centre of attention from the age of two, so I kind of knew I wanted to be an actress but didn’t realise how serious I was until I got to drama school and realised how amazing it would be to do for real. My appreciation for acting just grew.”

She was part of a Newcastle theatre group called First Act Theatre which marked her first serious involvement with acting. After school, she spent a year at E15 drama school in London before heading back to the North-East where she worked in Subway and a burger van in B&Q car park for a year.

Then she re-applied for drama school, going to Alra in Wandsworth. “It was the best place for me to train. It’s not regimental in the sense of doing classical texts. It’s about what’s expected of you as an actor, more about exploration as doing everything,” she says.

“It’s always tough leaving drama school but I was quite lucky because I got into the right head space. I had a carefree attitude – people are either going to get you or not.”

Her first job was The Trial Of Dennis Menace at London’s Southbank in which she played comic character Minnie the Minx in a Geordie accent. “It was a lot of fun and we had lots of silly things to do with whoopee cushions and water pistols. It was a musical with lots of songs but no dancing thankfully.”

She’s also been doing corporate work, going in and pretending to be various people in the workplace, and bibs-and-bobs with friends along with unpaid workshops at the Globe Theatre.

Sing Something Simple is her second “proper” job. “You just have to keep plugging away.

A lot of actors are waiting for the phone to ring.

It’s the wrong attitude. I remember I was told at drama school that no one owes you a career.”

She’s been overwhelmed by the way Brooks, who was Alan Ayckbourn’s first dramatist in residence at Scarborough, has worked in rehearsals.

“It’s a very specific method but it really works and you learn to be less selfish. It’s quite easy to care about your performance and what you’re doing, but it’s about what everybody is doing.”

  • Sing Something Simple: Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, April 3-4. Box office 01723-370541 and online at SJT.uk.com