FEATURE Amateur dramatics and the Essex Youth Theatre took up much of Robert’s teenage years, but then at the age of seventeen he formed a youth theatre company called Breadline. “We went to the best directors in town and asked them to help us, which they did, and we went on to win at national festivals.” During that year Robert auditioned for RADA and was successful in getting a place at one of the UK’s top drama schools. As with so many young actors then, Robert went straight out to work in repertory theatre. “In those days you had to have an Equity card - it was a ‘Catch-22’ situation - but fortunately the artistic director of the local theatre phoned me up in my first term at RADA and said that he needed someone to play the backend of the pantomime camel,” Robert laughs as he remembers how he was paid £17 and sixpence. “Unfortunately it had its downside because being the festive season the front end of the camel wasn’t well on occasions - so it was an ordeal by wind!” After appearing on stage for nine years, five years at the Theatre Royal in Stratford and three in Edinburgh, Robert once again formed a company with two friends, director David Wyn Jones and actor Peter Barkworth. “We became the resident company at the New End theatre in Hampstead.” This turns out to be synchronistic with Robert’s performed reading at the literary festival of a new play based on the life
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and writings of P G Wodehouse. “One of the very first new plays that we did was called Talk to Me by William Humble who has written the Wodehouse in Wonderland piece that I am doing here,” Robert explains. Something else that has come full circle is the fact that Robert’s first big break in television was the comedy drama Jeeves and Wooster - written by P G Wodehouse. What was it that inspired Robert to start writing novels? “I’ve always written, in my twenties I was writing plays and I wrote several television pilots,” Robert states. “I had an idea for a crime series which I co-created with a very fine writer called Brian B. Thomson and that got picked up by Radio 4.” Called Trueman and Riley, with Robert playing Trueman and Duncan Preston playing Riley, the programme ran for three series. That started Robert’s journey into crime writing until another novelist friend suggested that Robert write a novel. “I already had a plot, but it was set in Yorkshire, and then I realised that the ideal place to set it would be Gibraltar, a place that I have been visiting and know really well because of family connections for the past thirty years.” Will Killing Rock be the last Gibraltar set novel? “I am writing a standalone novel next, set in Spain, and then I will be back to do my fourth Sullivan and Broderick Rock murder investigation in the spring.”
JANUARY 2019
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