Mark Stobbart talks to Steve Pratt about his varied roles to date and his return to the region

PLAYING a tree in his first job out of drama school made Stockton-born actor Mark Stobbart wonder exactly what he'd let himself in for.

The role may have been with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, but the production was a long way from Shakespeare - a stage version of the children's book The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.

"I played a tree on stilts," he recalls. "I had a 3ft head-dress of branches. I thought to myself, 'Is this the culmination of three years at drama school - to play a tree in a long frock?'"

He was back in a dress for the revival of TV's Auf Wiedersehen Pet, as Oz's long-lost son. The role wasn't that straightforward as the character, it emerged to Oz's initial horror, was gay and working as a drag artist in nightclubs.

"That's quite daunting when you have to wear a lilac dress, have false fingernails and a blonde wig," he says. "It's not as though you're from an area where that's commonplace."

As the character was part of a plot twist, he was asked to keep quiet about it until the series was shown. "I just let people enjoy it. They'd say, 'this is me mate coming on now' when they were watching with their families - and then I'd appear in drag. It was great fun," he says.

At 25, he was too young to have watched the original series. "I saw a few bits but mum and dad wouldn't let me see it," he recalls. "I knew of it and knew the cast. My dad used to sing the theme song and had the tapes. I watched them when I was a bit older."

Stobbart has spent a lot of his career dressed up, although filming one of the current TV commercials for Tango drinks brought other problems. He plays a poor chap who's catapulted into a barrel full of oranges, something that was achieved with the help of a stunt co-ordinator and 250 oranges for the final shot in which he's showered by crushed fruit.

"They just squeezed the oranges over me," he says. "I didn't have time for a shower afterwards as it was 11 at night. They said they had a car waiting outside to take me home, and I had to leave as I was. I don't know what people made of an actor covered from head to toe in orange juice."

His latest role, in the Tyne Tees Television Hothouse pilot Reps, is more ordinary. He plays one of three young lads (Elliott Jordan and Michael Imerson are the others) recruited as kitchen sales reps by a manager (comedian Bradley Walsh) whose motto is "everybody in this world has a price".

The drama follows them out of training and on to the streets on Tyneside. It was written and directed by Andy Ross, from Sunderland, based on his own experiences as a kitchen sales rep.

Stobbard says his character Rick is "a scallywag who doesn't have much luck with women, which is quite the norm for me really. He's highly strung and doesn't really have much time for selling kitchens, just sees it as a way of earning a bit of money to go out and have a drink with his mates."

Ross took the actors out in Newcastle and Sunderland to get a feel for selling door-to-door. "We went round the type of estates that reps would be selling to. We had to look around and try to choose which houses from the outside looked like they would have prospective clients," he says.

"We went round with Andy. It was like he was the boss. He was saying, 'Look down this street, which would you knock at?' It was like being back at school."

Stobbart is now based in London because, he says, that's where the work is. Reps was a rare production being made in the North-East. He moved to the capital seven years to attend Mountview Drama School, after starting his stage career performing in musicals at secondary school in Stockton.

"It was a great way of having girls look up to you, while you were playing Danny Zuko in Grease. I started taking it more seriously during my A-levels when I realised I wasn't going to be a physician," he says.

The RSC tree role was his first out of drama school. He was also understudying one of the leading roles and went on four or five times during the five-month run.

He followed that with another costume role, alternating the part of the French leader in Napoleon The Musical in London's West End. But scallywag Rick is, he says, "nearer to me as a person than being a French dictator or a bloke dressed up in women's clothing."

He also reckons he's had his fill of musicals, and is keen to do more theatre. He's been joined in London by his younger brother Dean Stobbart, who's also an actor and has just finished a run in the Madness musical Our House in the West End. "We're living together and up for the same roles," says Mark.

* Reps is on Tyne Tees Television tomorrow at 10.30pm