'It is easy to get carried away with your success'.

Byline: LAURA DAVIS 

WITH JB Priestley's When We Are Married, Les Dennis's acting career has come full circle. His first theatrical experiences were performing plays at Calderstones School with Clive Barker and Jude Kelly.

While Dennis went into comedy, Barker become an internationally-renowned horror writer and Kelly successfully revamped the West Yorkshire Playhouse before taking over as artistic director of the South Bank.

It is at the Leeds theatre that When We Are Married was launched last month in a collaboration with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse.

What is more, Dennis's first experience of the play was directed by Kelly in the West End, starring Liverpool-born Alison Steadman.

"We did the school plays and then, when Clive went to Liverpool University and I was still at school, he would write some plays and we would perform them at the Liverpool Everyman out of season," he remembers. "It was that and watching the amazing productions at the Playhouse and the Everyman during the Alan Dosser years that made me always want to come back to acting at some point." The last time Dennis appeared at the Playhouse was as Yvan in the national tour of hit comedy Art, alongside Christopher Cazenove and John Duttine.

"We had a great week there and I kept telling John and Chris 'wait until we get to Liverpool, the audience will be fantastic'," he recalls. "The people of Liverpool love their theatre and if it's a good play they will come." In Priestley's 1938farce, Dennis plays Herbert Soppitt, one member of three couples gathered to celebrate their silver wedding anniversaries who discover their vows may have not been as binding as they thought.

"JB Priestley is a master of that kind of ensemble piece that's got a social relevance, even though the idea of three couples and not being married is not really shockable today," he says.

His niece Jodie McNee (Mary in the BBC's Liverpool Nativity) is also among the 13-strong cast, as maid Ruby Birtle.

"It's the first time we've worked together and she's great in the play," Dennis says.

"The people in service are the characters that are the voice of Priestley, I think, whereas the couples have forgotten that they came from working class and they've got above themselves.

"It's a really interesting insight into the class system of that time, and how we are so obsessed about getting up the social ladder." This theme is something that speaks strongly to Dennis, given his own rapid rise to fame and the near disaster that was his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. His subsequent role in Ricky Gervais's Extras would set his career back on path.

"It makes you aware that sometimes with fame and success you can get a bit carried away," he says.

When We Are Married will be at the Playhouse for the next two weeks, but it won't be the last we see of Dennis. He reveals: "I'm in talks at the moment with some people about coming back to Liverpool with something, another acting job, but I can't give any more details at the moment.

* WHEN We Are Married is at the Liverpool Playhouse until May 23.

* THE Daily Post will be holding a live webchat with Les Dennis on Tuesday, May 12, when he will be answering readers' questions.

Further details to be announced..

CAPTION(S):

Les Dennis, Jodie McNee, Tricia Kelly, Eileen O'Brien and Tom Georgeson, in When We Are Married Picture: JASON