Brassed Off, York Theatre Royal, September 6 to 25

FINE TIME Fontayne has never forgotten the Miners' Strike of 1984.

The South Yorkshire actor may have a dandy stage name and had posters of Lulu and Marlene Dietrich on his walls in his art school days in Barnsley, but he comes from mining stock.

So the chance to play the lead role of Danny, the brass band conductor battling with errant musicians, pneumoconiosis and mine closures alike, in York Theatre Royal's production of Brassed Off is poignant.

"My cousins were miners; my dad was a miner and all his brothers were miners, and so were his sisters' husbands. I was performing in Scarborough at the time of the strike, so I had lots of fun walking round Barnsley with people shouting 'scab' at me... although it was all meant in a very pleasant way," he recalls.

"But I remember the pain of that strike, and though I was working as an actor and being successful, what happened to the miners made me very angry and it sill hurts now."

Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden put the idea of playing Danny to Fine Time after seeing him at the funeral of actor Stuart Golland.

"He said, 'Look I've got a project for you, give me a ring', so I did. Bless him, I was already contracted to work on another job from September 13 but he said 'OK, use the rehearsals rooms here'."

Consequently, Fine Time can combine his Theatre Royal role with directing a show for the Penrith-based Quandam Theatre Company Theatre for the fifth time. "I do a show for them every September," he says.

From September 13, by night Fine Time will be starring in Brassed Off and by day he will be directing rehearsals of Top Banana, a three-hander by North Eastern playwright David Napthine, in which Fine Time also will appear.

"It's a new comedy that looks at a New Labour politician in the North. It's basically a corruption of the Faust story, inspired by that 'Rapture' fundamentalist thing that Bush and Blair are into, and I play Michael, the Devil. What more could you ask for?"

Joining him in the Top Banana cast will be John Davitt, who is appearing alongside Fine Time in Brassed Off, and Christina Newton, a York actress as chance would have it.

He has met the dual challenge by changing a habit of a lifetime.

"What I've done for Brassed Off, and it's the first time I've done it, is learn the part of Danny completely before starting rehearsals, knowing that I have to learn the part of Michael for Top Banana as well. Normally, I'll learn a role as rehearsals progress but I didn't dare do that this time," says Fine Time.

"It feels very strange for me to be doing it this way. You find yourself making decisions and then Damian challenges them and you think 'Oh. I never thought of it that way, we better try it'."

He brings personal recollections to the role of Danny. "I saw my Uncle Jack die of pneumoconiosis, and I can remember seeing him doing the breathing exercises, where you blow against your mouth to create pressure, so that you get relief when you breath. It had the effect of bringing up all this black mucus," he says.

"That memory informs my performance in two ways: it informs it physically and it informs it psychologically in that I saw the distress his illness caused my Aunty May and my cousins. I remember the anger and the bravery, and you would see the kind of tenacity Danny has in Brassed Off in Jack. He didn't want sympathy: he would be one pub behind but he always wanted to catch up."

Brassed Off, York Theatre Royal, September 6 to 25. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 15:53 Thursday, September 02, 2004