Former Hollyoaks actress Katherine Dow Blyton is used to playing the part of mum. She tells Steve Pratt why she ends up Bollywood dancing in her new play.
SOUTH Shields-born actress Katherine Dow Blyton has reached a certain age in her life and that means one thing - she's cast as a mother.
"I'm not going to play a daughter unless the mother is in her 70s.
I'm at that mum age, although I don't have children of my own," she says.
Audiences at York Theatre Royal last saw her as the boozy, brassy mum in A Taste Of Honey.
Now she's appearing at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds as single mum Kate in Bollywood Jane.
You'd be right to infer from the title of Amanda Whittington's Bradford-set play that the story is a fusion of East and West cultures, as disenchanted teenager Jane (played by Leeds-born actress Nichola Burley) escapes her humdrum existence in the glittering song and dance world of Indian movies.
The production is being staged as Yorkshire plays host to the 2007 International Indian Film Awards (IIFA). Bollywood Jane is part of the Fringe Festival for this international event.
The show features a 20-strong community chorus of local performers as well as footage and music from Dilwhale Dulhania Le Jayenge, one of the highest-earning Bollywood movies of all time.
"The play would work in any place where there's an Asian community,"
says Blyton, who moved to York six years ago. "I play Kate, a single mum who finds it quite a struggle and who's not suited to the mum role.
"She's fiercely protective of her daughter and doesn't want her to end up messing up her life like Kate feels she's done with hers.
"They're constantly on the run from bad relationships and bad debts, and end up in this really appalling flat. Then Jane discovers Bollywood music, which she uses as an escape."
Blyton grew up in Garforth, just outside Leeds, after her parents moved from South Shields when she was a child. "I still have family in Shields. I regard that as home, more than Leeds," she says.
Reading the script of Bollywood Jane, she "absolutely fell in love with the play", she says. "It's such a beautifully written show, I really wanted to do it."
The biggest shock was discovering that Kate joins in the Bollywood- style dancing at the end of the play. "That came as a surprise, not being a dancer," she says.
"They're all such energetic dancers and have worked so hard.
The finale song and dance is really a celebration. There's a happy ending, which seems right and I'm not always a great fan of happy endings, perhaps because of my pessimistic side."
Her longest time in the mother role was her four-and-a-half years as Sally Hunter on C4's soap Hollyoaks.
"It was a tremendous experience, I absolutely loved it,"
she says.
Her parents were both in an amateur stage group, the Westovians, in South Shields, from being teenagers, so perhaps acting was in her blood. After studying for a drama degree at Bretton Hall, near Leeds, she went straight into the business.
She regrets that today people just want to be famous and go on television. The reality show syndrome.
"Your training starts when you leave drama school.
Someone likened it to driving, you learn after you pass your test by doing it."
* Bollywood Jane is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from June 2-30. Tickets 0113-2137700 or online at www.wyp.org.uk
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