Time to corpse

STEVEN Pinder is multi-tasking – doing a telephone interview and keeping an eye on the cricket on the TV at the same time. He has a morning off from his stage role of comforting an old friend after the sudden death of his fiancee so is taking the opportunity to catch up on the latest in the South Africa/England test match.

Helping someone through bereavement hardly sounds like the basis for a comedy but Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends – the stage production Pinder is rehearsing – does extract laughs of a darker hue from the situation.

Former Brookside actor Pinder is joined by several of other familiar TV faces, including Emmerdale and The Bill, in this Harrogate Theatre and Oldham Coliseum co-production.

It’s only the second Aykbourn play in which he’s appeared. The other was the Christmas-set Seasons Greetings. “But I’ve seen a lot and been in companies where they’ve done a lot because Ayckbourn is the most performed playwright,” he says. “If you’re in a rep company these days you’d be hard pressed not to be in an Ayckbourn.”

The play has five old friends rallying round to support mutual friend Colin after his fiancee’s death. The tea party proves the trigger for unresolved tensions among the group to resurface with a vengeance.

“This is one that of his plays that’s got a bit of darkness to it.

He was writing these sort of plays around the mid-Seventies,”

he says.

Audiences have to get used to the fact that being written 30-odd years ago, this is a play where characters don’t reach for a computer or mobile phone, and a woman’s place was more likely to be in the home.

“The characters are firmly placed in the mould where there were not as many women in the workplace,” he explains.

The house of his character Paul is the setting for the friends’ reunion. “He’s done quite well because his kids are away at private school,” he says.

“There are very few redeeming things about this character. He’s a bully, a chauvinist and his wife is very unhappy.

“Colin is a glass half-full person, an optimist. His friends think he’s going to need cheering up and they’re hardly qualified people to do that. That’s where the dark humour starts.”

He says it’s one of the few plays at which he laughs out loud.

Playing his other half is former The Bill actress Kerry Peers, with whom he toured in Terry Johnson’s comedy Dead Funny.

The cast also includes Samantha Giles (who played Bernice in Emmerdale), Dominic Gately and Poppy Tierney. Colin is played by David Crellin, who was Billy Hopwood in Emmerdale and most recently toured in Kes. Yorkshire-raised Nikolai Foster directs the play, which premiered in Scarborough in 1974.

Pinder recently toured the stage version of long-running TV comedy Last Of The Summer Wine, which included Darlington Civic among its dates.

“That was quite a long time, from summer to the end of November. I’ve gone from being the youngest member of the cast in that to the oldest in Absent Friends,” he says.

He is, of course, recognisable to followers of C4’s Scouse soap Brookside as Max Farnham. He last appeared in the series eight years ago, the year before it was axed. Since then he’s been on the road doing theatre – “an incredible amount, with a little bit of telly here and there”.

He spent 13 years in Brookside from 1990 to 2003, with a break from 1998-99. “If you do ten years in one series you start to lose it a little bit, just working in front of a camera about 4ft away from you,” he says.

“Something like Brookside becomes such a day-to-day job you feel you’re not in the business any more, especially filming in Liverpool for a long time. Before Hollyoaks came along, it was the only programme being made there, so you really felt alone.”

He managed to get time off to do a couple of stage plays during his time as Max, as well as a pantomime “which I quite fancied doing”.

“I come from Blackburn so I went to the theatre in Bolton, Manchester and Lancaster. I didn’t give a lot of time to telly because at that age I didn’t know how to get into it. That was the plan, but telly came along almost straight away after I left drama school in the 80s.”

Absent Friends will take him to Oldham, where the production opens, and Basingstoke as well as Harrogate Theatre. “I’ve only been to Harrogate to see a friend in pantomime seven or eight years ago and was really taken with it,” he says.

■ Absent Friends, Harrogate Theatre, February 25 to March 13. Box Office: 01423-502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk ■ The theatre has teamed up with Yorkshire Tea for a competition to win a Yorkshire Tea Hamper, which includes cakes and biscuits, mugs, apron and tea towel as well as boxes of Yorkshire Tea. People booking tickets for Absent Friends before January 30 will be entered