Theatre is Frances' second home

THE sun is shining and the temperature is creeping towards 28C. Keswick’s visitors, in shorts and sunglasses and clutching dripping ice creams, are looking stunned at an unusually brilliant blue sky. And actress Frances Marshall is preparing to dive into the lake after a sweltering session in Theatre by the Lake’s rehearsal room.

“This is a most beautiful place,” she enthuses and keeps enthusing for a conversation that runs for 51 minutes without a single cynical word. “It feels very much like a second home here. If I could work here all the time, I would probably happily move.”

Fran, like many an actor, is based in London but by November she will have spent the best part of a year in Keswick, playing Mrs Darling in Peter Pan at Christmas last year and then returning soon after to rehearse for the 2015 summer season.

“My family’s roots are in Northumberland and we used to spend our summers in the Cheviots when I was a kid. I love being in the country but I never thought my job would allow me to live there. But I can live and work in the country when I’m here.”

Fran grew up in York, the daughter of an opera singer mum and a drama teacher dad, so the call of the stage was almost inevitable. She acted in school plays but realised only at 13 that performing might be her career. She read drama at the University of Hull and then studied for two years at drama school.

She has previously appeared at Theatre by the Lake in two Christmas and two spring productions but this is her first summer. She has roles in the three Main House productions: The 39 Steps, a glorious send-up of John Buchan’s stiff upper lip adventure story in which the cast of four has as much fun as the audience; Abigail’s Party, the funny-but-awful play by Mike Leigh that was a huge hit on television in the seventies; and Noel Coward’s early comedy Fallen Angels. She is loving them all.

Fran has a boyfriend in the deep south but until November she will remain seriously – but professionally - involved with, another man, actor Jonny McPherson with whom she has no fewer than five relationships. She dallies with him three times in The 39 Steps; she then becomes his wife twice, not too happily in Abigail’s Party, more so in Fallen Angels.

A similar extended working relationship continues with Polly Lister, a Theatre by the Lake regular. The two are paired in Abigail’s Party, Fran as Angela, Polly as the awesome Beverley. In Fallen Angels, which opens on Saturday, July 25, the two are back together as Julia and Jane, friends who prepare to meet again the lover with whom both had a fling before they married.

“By now, Polly and I have already been working together for three months and have taken that experience into rehearsals for Fallen Angels, in which the two friends are perfectly respectable members of society - but with memories of a time of complete passion.

“They spend a scene verbally abusing each other and getting drunk because they are stressed and afraid and don’t know how they are going to react to meeting their former lover again.”

Cue more enthusing. This “fantastic season” has “stunning parts” for women who make up exactly half of the 12-actor company. Apart from a bit of cross-dressing in The 39 Steps, all the women play women and all the men play men.

But some campaigning theatre women are now pushing for more gender-blind casting. “I’m all in favour of it - so long as you are not doing it just to be gender-blind. I was very excited by the idea of Maxine Peake playing Hamlet at the Royal Exchange in Manchester this year.

“There is no reason why a part can’t be played by whoever you want to cast in it so long as you have the right actor to do it and the right ideas about the production. A woman playing Hamlet should bring something new to the part, add something that we have never seen before.”

When the Theatre by the Lake season ends, Fran will take a break, probably spend Christmas back in York and then hit the road as a wandering player again, returning almost certainly at some point soon to the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse next to the Globe on London’s South Bank.

There she has worked regularly on Read Not Dead, a project to present - in a single day - script-in-hand productions of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries that have seldom or never been staged since his time. “Sometimes you uncover a gem; sometimes it’s something awful. But gems more often than not.”

But now it’s time to rejoin her colleagues in that sauna-like rehearsal room with just a pause for some more enthusing: “This theatre has been great at creating companies of the loveliest people. I haven’t had a bad company experience here. This time, we are a very sociable group. We like each other’s company.”

Fallen Angels runs at Theatre by the Lake until November 7.

Box office 017687-74411.