EXPLOSIVE humour is heading for Tyneside this winter when the Royal Shakespeare Company's annual tour links three of the best of the Bard's comedies with five dramas celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot.

Tickets for the RSC season, from November 14 to December 3, go on sale from June 1. The event is being dedicated to Newcastle Theatre Royal chief executive Peter Sarah who died in April.

Associate director Dominic Cooke also had the sad duty of announcing that popular actor Nicky Henson is too ill in his battle with cancer to undertake the North-East visit and his part of Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night is being taken by Clive Wood.

A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Comedy Of Errors are the other two Theatre Royal productions. The People's Theatre at Heaton is staging the Gunpowder plays which open with Shakespeare's banned play Thomas More and conclude with a work commissioned from playwright Frank McGuinness called Speaking Like Magpies.

Mr Cooke surprised the press conference, which launched the event, by being unaware of the strong Northern links of main Gunpowder Plot members Guy Fawkes, born in York, and Thomas Percy, who had duties involving Northumberland and family links to Prudhoe Castle.

Mr Cooke said: "Oh really, well everyone claims it. There were so many people involved in the plot that I'm sure it has a fairly wide geographical spread."

He admitted that even the name of McGuinness's work about the plotters wasn't a clever pun on Newcastle United fans but just a coincide taken from a 1605 pledge that suspects would be made to sing like magpies.

For Box Office sales from June 1 ring 0870 905 5060 and for information about the season go to www.theatreroyal.co.uk/rsc or www.rsc.org.uk

Published: 21/05/2005