Geordie actor Trevor Fox talks to Viv Hardwick about his lead role in The Pitmen Painters which brought him back to his acting roots and rekindled his school friendship with playwright Lee Hall.

EVERYONE thought that Geordie actor Trevor Fox was mad when he gave up a leading West End role in Billy Elliot The Musical to become the understudy for a new work by Lee Hall, The Pitmen Painters. Now, the work has taken him to Broadway and he’s just become the play’s pivotal character Oliver Kilbourn for a tour to Darlington and Newcastle.

For years, Fox has gained a reputation as a talented, jobbing actor with roles spread across regional and national theatre plus TV mainstays like Emmerdale. So what are his thoughts about assuming one of his biggest roles to date?

“This is a blessing of a role for an actor, particularly in this day and age because everybody says they’ve never known the situation to be so bad. The last six years I’ve been really busy. I did Billy Elliot and then I went to work at Shakespeare’s Globe and then back into Billy Elliot.

“When I first saw The Pitmen Painters at Live Theatre, Newcastle) I went to Max Roberts (the director) and Lee Hall and said ‘I’ve got to do this show somehow. This is the play I’ve been waiting to do all my life and it sums up everything I feel about Art and class and politics and theatre. I told them that, in any form, I wanted to be part of it.

“Everybody thought I was mad when I gave up the principal part in one of the biggest shows in the West End to go and be an understudy. I don’t think like that. That doesn’t bother me. Then to do the play on tour and take it into the West End is like a dream come true,” he says.

Such was Fox’s formidable reputation for knowing all the leading male parts, that the rest of the cast admitted they feared getting ill. As a result his acting opportunities were limited to a dress rehearsal at The National Theatre and a dramatic night when Chris Connel, who earned his own rave reviews as Oliver Kilbourn, was suddenly taken ill on stage at Plymouth. Now Fox steps into the role of the Ashington Pitman who was tempted by the opportunity to give up hewing coal for painting masterpieces.

“It was the last day of the tour at Plymouth and we’d been on tour for ever. It was a Saturday and me and Chris were going to drive back to the North-East that night. It got into the first half and I thought ‘well everybody is fine, I’m going to go out for a pizza’. You’re not supposed to go out but I thought that nothing had happened for ten weeks and something like 100 shows. On my way to the stage door I could hear, over the tannoy, that the audience were talking.

I thought that was funny and then I heard announcements of ‘Trevor Fox to the stage’ and the curtain was down and Chris was ill. So I went on from halfway through the first half.

Fortunately, that part was the only one I’d done before,” says Fox, who was originally going to tour this year in the role of Harry vacated by another Newcastle actor, Michael Hodgson. Fortunately, Hodgson is available to continue now that Connel has given up the Kilbourn role.

“Chris has been doing the role for so long that he’s taken the decision to come out of the show. Luckily, there was a four-week gap after we played Windsor but, in a way, I’m a bit apprehensive because it’s been such a successful show and he’s been such a wonderful Oliver Kilbourn.

“It is a big role. I think there are only five seconds in the first scene and a minute-and-a-half at the beginning of the last scene when Oliver’s not on stage. I did do a week-anda- half in New York when Chris wasn’t well and I know the role is very tiring. So I’ve now got 20 weeks without a break.

“But it does feel like coming home.

It’s been so long since I’ve done a show in the North-East. It must be something like seven years,” says Fox.

A run of the play at the Tyne Theatre means that The Pitmen Painters will have played nearly all the region’s major venues in the last five years. “All we need now is a run at the Sunderland Empire,” jokes Fox.

“I think this play could go on and on. It has a kind of History Boys feel about it,” he says, adding that his old school pal Lee Hall has given permission for Newcastle’s The People’s Theatre to put on an amateur version.

Both Fox and Hall were inspired by Benfield Comprehensive School drama teacher Chris Heackles, who directs this special production.

“Lee gave the theatre permission because it’s celebrating its centenary and this seems a very appropriate play,” explains Fox.

“I’ve known Lee for ever because I went to school with him. He was always so clever and he wasn’t odd, just a very clever lad from day one. I remember walking back from school with him and discussing sweets and what’s on the telly. Then 30 years later he’s writing polemic dramas about the state of the world and art and I’m still talking about sweets and what’s on the telly,” says Fox, modestly.

In Billy Elliot, Fox was cast as George the boxing teacher and jokes that director Stephen Daldry told him that if he’d auditioned he probably wouldn’t have got the role “because you can’t sing and you can’t dance”.

“I’d never really worked with a choreographer and musical director before, but I think that Lee and Stephen created a role for me because they wanted me around. Towards the end of the first year, the musical director told me ‘you’re singing just a little bit flat in the last song, do you think you can sing a little bit quieter?’ I said ‘why don’t you turn my microphone off’. He answered "Trevor, we’ve never turned your microphone on’. But they still invited me back and I’d love to do it again."