ROYAL Shakespeare Company actor Barnaby Kay is used to having the first word. He speaks the opening line in all three plays in which he appears in the current season.

In Twelfth Night, it's the well-known speech beginning "If music be the food of love" and he admits it can be nerve-wracking.

"To be the first person to speak and say one of the most famous speeches of Shakespeare is incredibly daunting when you know 50 or 60 per cent of the audience know what you're going to say," he says.

Kay actually hesitates before speaking those lines on stage. He opens his mouth as if about to speak, then hesitates again. Such a pregnant pause is a risk but he says that "no-one has given me a prompt yet or shouted out the line from the audience".

His arrival in Newcastle with the RSC next month for the company's annual North-East season holds special meaning for him as he has family connections with the city.

His grandfather, Arthur Kay, was chairman of The People's Theatre in Jesmond in the 1960s and 1970s, while his grandmother, Alison Kay, set up soup kitchens in the city.

Although the RSC is presenting productions in its Gunpowder season of political plays at the People's, Kay isn't among the cast. So he'll be denied the chance to act on that stage for the first time. "I've never acted there but I will go on the stage and see what it's like while I'm up there," he says.

His grandmother's death in 2001 brought home to him how much she'd done for the homeless in Newcastle with her soup kitchens, which are still operating today. "Her funeral was extraordinary because so many of the people she called her old men, the homeless of Newcastle, turned up," he recalls.

"There were guys who'd reformed and made something of their lives as a result of what my grandmother did. One gave an incredibly moving speech that she had saved his life.

"Halfway through the service, the doors of the church burst open and a man walked down the aisle. He had a single flower and just placed it on the coffin, he was in floods of tears, and then just walked out again."

Kay barely knew his grandfather, who died in 1970, and his own actor father Richard Kay, who was killed in a road accident, never saw him act. "The only time he could have seen me was a school production of My Fair Lady in which I was playing Higgins, but he was at Oxford Playhouse playing Higgins in Pygmalion, which was turned into the musical My Fair Lady" he says.

"I don't think I'd have been an actor if he hadn't died. It happened before I did my A-levels and he was very keen for me to go to university. He was always pushing leaflets at me about being a legal executive or something."

Again, it took a funeral - his father's - to bring everything into focus. "His funeral was such an extraordinary star-studded affair," recalls Kay. "We hadn't invited anyone specifically but the small country church was bursting, and when we came out there were another 100 people outside. They were mainly actors. I realised there had been so much support for him in the business.

"They seemed to be talking as if me being an actor was an inevitability. I said to mum that night that it was something I should think about. She said how she used to say to my father, 'I know Barnaby is going to be an actor'. That was the encouragement I needed to know that's what I wanted to do."

His father's agent took him on his books while he was still at drama school, which led to him joining the RSC in A Jovial Crew at the start of his career. "They put me up for an audition for the practice. It wasn't just the one audition, I had to see all the directors," he says. When he was offered a place at the RSC, he left drama school early in the belief that his training could only get better if he was working with top directors and technicians.

"To come to this institution made an emotional impression," he says of his arrival at the RSC. "I only had a small part in A Jovial Crew, which hadn't been performed for 400 years and had been re-written and adjusted by Stephen Jeffreys. My part was written up, which was very lucky. He wrote some fantastic speeches and couplets for my character."

He also had the first word when the prologue, unassigned when rehearsals began, was later handed to him to speak.

Kay has been "longing to come back" to the RSC, waiting for the right combination of parts and directors with whom he wanted to work.

He has played at Newcastle Theatre Royal before, a few years ago in a touring production of Arms And The Man. "It's always a pleasure to come to Newcastle because I have family there and can stay with them. It's hard to see them otherwise. It's lovely to spend time with them," he says.