BUMHEAD! Snot! A Yorkshire frog! Howard Gossington and Letty Butler have been well and truly initiated into the theatre world of Nick Lane, a land of amusing insults, bogey and bum jokes and plainspeaking amphibians.
They are in their second week of performing the premiere of Lane's latest fable for children aged four and upwards, The Elves And The Shoemaker at York Theatre Royal.
"I haven't seen his plays before, " admits Howard.
"I saw his first adult play, Derby McQueen, in York, " says Letty. "I came with my mum to see Eamonn Fleming, after we'd seen him in Blue Remembered Hills in 2005. My mum is part of the theatre business; she's an agent, and whatever she's interested in, I go to as well."
Howard had appeared alongside Eamonn in the Dennis Potter play, and when Eamonn was looking to cast The Elves in his directorial debut, he remembered those blue hills.
"I was very surprised but obviously very flattered, " Howard says. "In Blue Remembered Hills, you have adults playing children and I'd played someone who was bullied and was burned alive in a shed.
"In The Elves, we're two elves telling a story and we're playing lots of different people in that story. Very different shows, you could say!"
Howard is called on to do use plenty of voices, old, Yorkshire, New York and regally bonkers, in Lane's play.
"I've done lots of things with different, silly voices and I did a show called Spoof! on BBC1 and CBC that was essentially Dead Ringers for kids. I did Prince William, Ron Weasley from Harry Potter, and Raven from CBC, a sort of dungeons and dragons thing? not that Eamonn would necessarily have known about that."
Letty was delighted to be picked to play the elf Peeptoe and the shoemaker's cruel wife in The Elves.
"I'd heard about how good Nick's work was for children, and I've always been attracted to children's theatre. In many ways it's a much more honest form of theatre because, if you don't hold their attention, they let you know, " she says.
"In children's theatre, you know you're going to get such an array of noises, so it's good for your discipline on stage, especially as I'm quite prone to corpsing!"
She is also enjoying her return to the world of children's logic.
"You find yourself thinking, 'would I believe in this? When did I stop doing that?'." says Letty. "For me, that suspension of disbelief is really exciting."
The Elves And The Shoemaker, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until April 21. Box office: 01904 623568.
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