Royal Shakespeare company actor Forbes Masson tells Viv Hardwick why he's bringing a belly-laugh to one of the Bard's bloodiest plays.

LAUGH-a-minute doesn't quite cover Forbes Masson's dramatic contribution to the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth, which arrives in blood-spattered glory at Newcastle's Theatre Royal in November.

He's playing the hellgate Porter using the longest belly-laugh in history as the character's introduction to an audience which, eventually, finds itself laughing along.

"When I first played the character it was kind of aggressive in a Scottish comedic way, and it's changed since I've been here. If the audience start laughing I'll continue much longer," he jokes. "If I'm acting too much they won't laugh, but if I just think of funny things then it works. I think it's a guy thing where you start laughing at stupid things and the laughter just builds and builds and you don't have to think about laughing, you just laugh more and it becomes hysterics. And that was the inspiration for what happens because I didn't really know what I was going to do with it."

He admits it's not in the script and that he doubts if Shakespeare would really approve, particularly as he's read the Bard's thoughts in Hamlet of "these comic actors who come and laugh at their own jokes and please don't allow that to happen". "And I thought 'Oh my God, William is frowning on me'," he says.

He also tells the ghost story of walking home from Stratford's famous Dirty Duck late one night and hearing a furious knocking on a gate by an unseen hand. "I thought it was somebody from the company taking the mickey and I went over and said 'Who's there?' and felt a bit ridiculous, but there was no-one there," he says.

Masson might have been haunted for good if he'd got away with his original idea of having the Porter say: "Is that a lager I see before me?"

The performer, writer and director, who has been based in London since 1998, has shifted from work aimed at Scotland and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a direct result of having worked with RSC artistic director Michael Boy in Glasgow..

"I worked with Michael for about ten years at The Tron and he encouraged me and Alan Cumming to write and do the double act we did," says Masson, who went on to create cult TV hit The High Life with Cumming. And if he's jealous at all about his former comedy co-star being resident in Hollywood, having starred in GoldenEye and X-Men 2, it doesn't show.

Cumming has even beaten Masson to Stratford, appearing in As You Like It, but now Masson is becoming better known south of the border. His biggest TV break recently has been predatory maths tutor Rodney Morris who took a shine to Nikki Dimarco in BBC1's EastEnders. Thanks to Boyd, he's been invited to play Horatio in Hamlet, which comes to Newcastle, and Judas in a new play called Pontius Pilate, which sadly doesn't.

He's particularly taken with Boyd's idea for Hamlet of basing rehearsals around copies of a US comic book version of the play, which turned the Prince of Denmark into a superhero. "It's like Hamlet as Spiderman and it's active and adventurous and totally fantastic. As such, the production has great drive," he explains.

Masson also enjoys the effect of Macbeth on younger audiences where rowdy schoolchildren are reduced to silence inside the theatre and are "banging on the windows of buses and really excited" when they see the actors leaving the stage door.

But he pulls a face when asked about some of the English accents of his co-stars. "No comment, there are some interesting pronunciations of place-names and you feel like saying 'Cawdor' is not 'Caaaw-door' but 'Corder', it's not something out of Lord Of The Rings."

"I went to one of these artistic post-show discussions and this woman came up and me and said 'I really loved your accent work' and I said 'Thank you very much, I used a tape of Scottish accents'."

* Forbes Masson appears in Hamlet, November 1-6 and Macbeth, November 9-13, at Newcastle's Theatre Royal. Box Office: 0870 905 5060

Mike Amos is away