PATRICK Bridgman has run out of fingers with which to tot up the number of roles he has in Theatre by the Lake’s 2015 summer season, which opens at the popular Keswick venue on May 23. At the last count, it looks as if his tally is 16, 13 of them in an adaptation of John Buchan’s adventure novel The Thirty-nine Steps, first published a century ago this year.

Not that the adaptation has much to do the book; it has rather more to do with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film with Robert Donat as dashing hero Richard Hannay (and John Laurie, later of Dad’s Army, as a dour Scottish crofter).

The play began life in the Yorkshire Dales in a version created by North Country Theatre to tour village halls. It was later adapted by Patrick Barlow and went on to storm the West End (where it is still running) and Broadway. It’s packed with thrills, villains, beautiful women and jokes and is at heart an hilarious send-up of British stiff upper lippery. Audiences will also be wonderstruck as they watch Patrick and just three other actors build the Forth railway bridge on stage before their very eyes.

“I have 13 costume changes, some involving just a hat, coat or clip-on tie," explains Patrick. "I play quite a few policemen, sinister heavies in trilbies and overcoats, hotel keepers, pilots pursuing Hannay, plus Mr Memory, a music hall act. It’s pretty frantic and there’s not much chance to catch your breath. When I’m not on stage, I’m changing into another costume.”

Patrick, who lives in Staveley, was born in Edinburgh but grew up Manchester after his journalist father moved from the Scotsman to the Guardian (six years after Manchester was dropped from its masthead). He went to Chetham’s School of Music and then on to Oxford, with the vague thought of becoming a composer. But he was seduced by student drama and abandoned music for the stage (where his skill on the piano has proved very useful).

Now 50, he has appeared at many theatres across Britain in roles ranging from Shylock in The Merchant of Venice to Alderman Fitzwarren in Dick Whittington. He is also probably the only British actor to have regularly played a whale: he has made several tours (last year to the Far East and North America) with the Tall Stories Theatre Company in an adaptation of Julia Donaldson’s The Snail and the Whale. (“An exquisite piece of theatre,” said The Stage.)

Patrick first trod Theatre by the Lake’s Main House stage as the butler in Charley’s Aunt, the production that opened the new building in 1999, when he took over from an injured actor. “His broken foot was my foot in the door,” he said.

He has particular, not always comfortable, memories of Joe Orton’s farce What the Butler Saw in which he played a police sergeant who both lost his trousers and had to descend a rope ladder while wearing a skimpy dress. He is rather happier recalling the acting challenge of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker.

He also very much enjoyed The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett and Shining City by Conor McPherson and he was part of the team that created the first production of Lisa Evans’s adaptation of Melvyn Bragg’s The Maid of Buttermere at Easter 2009.

“When I’m working at Theatre by the Lake, I live in Keswick, partly because I don’t drive,” said Patrick. “But I also live there because I like to belong to a community of actors who get on with each other to a greater or lesser degree in the course of seven months. The biggest attraction is the variety of work we get to do in that time. We have parts in three plays which run in repertory and unless we have been very unlucky with our roles, we’ll have some very contrasting work every week.

“The funny thing about acting is that people get to know each other quickly because it’s quite an intense process when you are having to pretend to be different people and adopt different relationships with each other for each play. And then, with a short run, you move on. But a longer stay in Keswick gives us a much better chance of getting to know each other.”

Patrick’s other roles this season could not be more different: he plays King Arthur in The Lady of the Lake by Benjamin Askew, the world première of a Theatre by the Lake commission, and Nick in Enlightenment, a psychological thriller by Shelagh Stephenson. “It’s a nicely contrasting line-up of parts,” he adds.

On days off, Patrick takes to the fells. “I’m also very happy to sit in one of Keswick’s many cafés with a book or to hunt for a second-hand book or bargain antique in Oxfam and other shops. And if there is a piano free at the theatre, I’ll go and play there for an hour.”

He is often recognised – Keswick is a small town - between café and fell. “There was moment in What the Butler Saw when, as my policeman character Sergeant Match, I did a dopey salute in the middle of the stage while dressed in my underpants. People would recognise me across the Market Square and stand and salute until I noticed them and returned the salute.”

*Theatre by the Lake's summer season of six plays opens on May 23 with The 39 Steps. Also from May 23 is Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams; opening on June 6 is Abigail’s Party; The Lady of the Lake by Benjamin Askew runs from June 13; Noel Coward's Fallen Angels opens on July 25, and completing the summer season line-up, which runs until November, is a psychological thriller - Enlightenment by Shelagh Stephenson, opening on August 1.

Box office 017687-74411.