Richard Goulding’s acting career got off to a flying start almost 20 years ago when the Royal Shakespeare Company unexpectedly came calling. This month sees him returning to the RSC to play Frank Ford in The Merry Wives Of Windsor. And, as he explains to What’s On, working for the Company is just as much of a treat now as it was all those years ago...

Plenty of actors have a story to tell about how they got their first big break in the profession. Richard Goulding - best known for playing Prince Harry in TV comedy The Windsors and this summer starring in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) new production of The Merry Wives Of Windsor - is no exception... 

A trip to Stratford while he was at drama school ultimately led to him performing on the most iconic stage of all, working alongside two theatrical giants - but it required more than a few stars to be in alignment.

“Our class did a production of The Tempest,” he recalls, “touring local schools and doing workshops, the reward for which was doing a performance in the Swan Theatre.

“After that show, I saw a poster outside the theatre for new productions of King Lear and The Seagull, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Sir Ian McKellen, starting in Stratford and then touring and going to the West End. I just thought that was the stuff of dreams; wouldn’t it be amazing to be in that. And by some weird confluence of the stars, I ended up being in it six months later.”

For ‘confluence’ you could just as easily read ‘coincidence’, as Richard thinks those school workshops played as big a part as his acting ability in attracting the attention of Sam Jones, the RSC’s head of casting at the time.

“I don’t know if this is true, but this is what I think,” he says, almost conspiratorially. “They were struggling to find someone to play Constantine in The Seagull and Edgar in King Lear, so they turned to drama schools and Trevor said to Sam ‘Find me a graduate.’”

He thinks this probably made her think of the workshops - and one particular incident - rather than the Swan performance he’d given the previous year. 

“Before I went to drama school, I’d been a schoolteacher, so I had some experience of dealing with unruly kids. We were struggling to get the attention of one particular group of children, so I used some of my teaching experience to wrest some attention from them. Sam had been at that workshop, and I think it must have stuck in her mind, because I’m sure it wasn’t anything to do with my acting!”

The rest is now history - although Richard admits that despite such an extraordinary start, his career hasn’t panned out quite the way he intended. 

“When I left drama school, my ambitions were to be at the RSC or the National, doing Shakespeare and classical plays, so it’s been a complete surprise to me that I’ve ended up doing so much television and comedy.”

His TV and film credits include a number of period (Grantchester, Traitors, Belgravia, The Crown) and factual (A Very British Scandal, Scoop) dramas, as well as comedies (The Windsors, Fresh Meat, Wicked Little Letters). And he regularly finds himself portraying real people - especially one particular member of the Royal Family. He played Prince Harry in three series of The Windsors as well as the hugely successful play, King Charles III, which went on to spawn a movie and BBC radio play.

“Prince Harry became part of my life in quite a big way for a long time, and while I’d never want to get away from it or deny it, it is a concern that one might become synonymous with that [character] to such an extent that it’s the only thing that people see you as.

“I seem to have got a bit boxed into this ‘posh idiot’ kind of bracket - oddly I’ve found a kind of talent for it in some ways!

“Thankfully some of the roles I’ve done recently have been nothing like that, which I’m pleased about - you want to be versatile and test yourself in other waters.”

It’s one of the reasons he’s delighted to be in Merry Wives, which he suggests is “in some ways a continuation of things I’ve done in the past, but also a break into something a bit new for me. My character is not an idiot, and he’s very rich but not particularly posh.”

Director Blanche McIntyre claims the play is one of Shakespeare’s most underrated works, suggesting that its farcical set pieces paved the way for the classic sitcom. It’s something she aims to reinforce by setting the latest production in a contemporary small town where gossip, suburban values and town politics are the order of the day.

Richard got onboard with the contemporary setting immediately.

“I think Merry Wives has a reputation for being a bit second rate among Shakespeare’s plays because it’s written in prose, is very middle class, provincial and the only comedy he wrote that’s set in England.

But it’s real life, so I think it’s a very good idea to set it in a contemporary world.

“As someone who didn’t really know [the play], I’ve been completely blown away by how brilliant it is. There are so many story threads and a very complicated plot, but if you get it right and make it clear, it’s wonderfully human, funny and moving at the same time, like all Shakespeare’s plays.”

The comedy is set in Windsor (“which in our production might look a bit like Stratford”), where the townsfolk, including the titular wives (played by Samantha Spiro and Siubhan Harrison) are going about their normal lives until Falstaff (John Hodgkinson) arrives “and makes complete chaos of everything”, according to Richard. 

“Blanche says it very well - he’s ‘the lord of misrule’. On the one hand you’re invited to judge Falstaff because of his disreputable, mischievous behaviour - with motives that you’d frown upon from a moralistic standpoint - but the play brilliantly, as so many of Shakespeare’s comedies do, points out that misrule is where real life lives. 

“My character in particular, Master Ford, lives this very tightly controlled, rules-based moralistic life, but that is turned inside out, and by the end he sees something like the truth about what it’s really like to live as a human being. If Falstaff hadn’t landed in Windsor, he wouldn’t have had that great revelation and lived the life he eventually had.”

This nicely mirrors Richard’s own life-changing moment back in 2006. He knows how lucky he was to be spotted in that classroom - if that’s really what happened, of course - and seems genuinely delighted to be making another appearance on the RSC stage, having also appeared in A Mad World My Masters, Titus Andronicus and Candide in 2013.

“The RSC has become a nice little staging post in my life and holds a great, lovely place in my heart,” he says.”It’s really lovely to be back.”

By Steve Adams

The Merry Wives Of Windsor shows at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Wednesday 5 June to Saturday 7 September