A brash new season of excitement at theatres across the Tees Valley will keep the customers coming right through into the summer holidays.

It brings in a wide range of entertainment that looks forwards and backwards with one real teaser being Shelagh Delaney's A Taste Of Honey which comes to the Civic Theatre at Darlington from Monday to Saturday, May 22-27.

The production is by the Oldham Coliseum which is also bringing Gordon Steel's Teesside set tragi-comedy Albert Nobbs to Middlesbrough Theatre from Tuesday to Saturday, July 18-22.

A Taste Of Honey stars Samantha Giles, who has been in Emmerdale and Where The Heart Is; and Bruno Langley, who was Todd and had the famous gay kiss in Coronation Street. More recently he has been time-travelling with Dr Who on BBC1.

The whole first series of the revamped stories of the Time Lord, complete with Todd's episodes, was repeated from last weekend as a timely taster before the new series starts tomorrow. A Taste Of Honey is currently in rehearsal at Oldham before opening a week tonight. "I have seen the film but I didn't know it before I knew I was going to get this part," says Todd.

"The book is on the school curriculum and I would have liked to have seen the play. Everyone I have spoken to says it was brilliant and they all think it's a great thing to do." Shelagh Delaney was just 21 when she wrote A Taste Of Honey and she set it in the Coronation Street country of working class Salford next to Manchester.

She also wrote it in the early sixties but set it in the late fifties. It features Jo, a young girl with a difficult mother who leaves home and gets pregnant by a Nigerian sailor who promptly leaves her. She is eventually befriended by Geoff, a gentle, kind-hearted young man who is probably gay, and the unlikely couple set up home together. Samantha Giles plays the mother.

"Geoff is an 18-year-old art student and very camp," says Bruno. "He's bi-sexual but I don't know if he's gay. In the film he didn't know if he was." Bruno discovered he had an interesting new talent during the early stages of rehearsals.

"I have to dance with a mop," he points out. How does he get on? "Well, the director was so impressed, it has been extended to a two minute solo. "I've only done it in rehearsals so far and never in front of an audience of 600 so I might have to do a bit more practising."

Bruno's career took the route that has become increasingly typical in recent times where an actor begins young on TV rather than on stage. "I started off in television and I'm trying to even it up by doing a bit of theatre now," he explains.

"You don't really have to be trained for TV so I'm not properly trained. "I had a year and a half of drama at college in Stockport and then I was busy playing a 16 to 17-year-old guy on TV. "Now I'm 23 and much more focused. I've been walking round the theatre and have seen all the pictures of the people who started here like Pat Phoenix."

Among his other recent theatre work is Romeo in Romeo And Juliet in Stafford. "I don't know if I did as well as I could have," he says honestly. He is equally blunt about TV. "You join Coronation Street and then it's sink or swim. If they think you can't cut it, you're out. If they keep you in, they think what they can do with you.

"I had been there about a year and a half when they told me Todd was going to be gay and have that gay kiss. "They did spring it on me a bit and I was quite shocked but that's the business. I said 'OK, if that's what you think, let's do it.'

"When the time came, I didn't enjoy it, but you just have to go with the flow and adapt to your surroundings."

© The Evening Gazette, 11/4/06

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