Worthing’s Rainbow Shakespeare tackles The Comedy Of Errors

“It's more than 20 years that I've been working with them,” Ross says. “I think I'm one of the oldest actors and artists in the company. I began by doing the Rainbow Theatre schools tours. We would do theatre in education in schools in Sussex and Surrey and Hampshire and we had a repertoire of about 12 different educational shows and workshops that we would do but then they asked me if I would like to do one of the Shakespeare plays and I just leapt at the chance because Shakespeare was the reason I became an actor in the first place.

“I was lucky enough to go to a private school called the West Sussex Theatre Studios and originally I wanted to be a musician like my late father but it was through doing dance and acting and singing and everything else that I discovered my passion for Shakespeare. The last production I did with them when I was 16 was Macbeth which was great.

“I think my love of Shakespeare goes back to that musical connection with my father and just wanting to be a musician. It is the appeal of the verse. I love words and language and what they can do for people. I think words are just magical and you can get a lot of positive things out of them. Shakespeare's poetry and the rhythms of his verse were just perfect for the artist or actor that I wanted to be, and I really love his phrasing. You can try to paraphrase Shakespeare into modern language to make it more understandable but you would just end up using twice as many words because he is just so succinct in what he says and that's really what appeals to me. But also the actors are just so fascinating and so much larger than life. I'm very much a character actor and I am a stage actor. I don't think I would particularly suit TV or film. I very much love that element of engaging with a live audience and working with them. You might do the same play the next night but it certainly won't be the same production.”

Among Ross’s highlights with the company was taking on the role of Hamlet back in 2005: “And I was just the right age for it. I was 30. It was a heck of a learn but funnily enough two years later when I did Leontes in The Winter's Tale that was actually more difficult to learn. There were fewer lines but there's something about Shakespeare's later verse that can be quite tricky.”

This year the first play is The Tempest, Tuesday-Sunday, July 11-16. The second play of the season is The Comedy Of Errors, Tuesday-Sunday, July 18-23. In The Tempest Ross is Trinculo; in The Comedy Of Errors he is Egeon, the father of the lost twins.

“I'm really, really looking forward to The Tempest which I've never done with Rainbow Shakespeare. They have done it twice, I think and I have missed it both times but I love the fact that it is a mix of tragedy and comedy. It's almost like a new modern form of drama that is emerging and the part that I've been offered is a great character part for me, Trinculo who is a bit of a weedy foolish jester.

“In The Comedy of Errors, I'm the father of the twins.”

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