written by David Ward, arts correspondent

Richard Keightley, now approaching the end of his seven-month stint in the summer company at Theatre by the Lake, came to Cumbria via China, Israel and many other lands far removed from Keswick.

Now 37 and based in London, he has played many roles both in Britain and abroad. He has acted in France (in French) and spent 10 months in the London production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (now in its 63rd year) before touring with it to Singapore, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.

He had heard good things about Theatre by the Lake from fellow actors and about the Lake District from his brother and sister-in-law, who are frequent visitors. But he made his own first trip only last Easter when he and 11 other actors gathered for rehearsals. “It has exceeded all my expectations,” he said. “I knew the theatre was by a lake and so realised the setting was going to be rural but I couldn’t believe the countryside I saw.

“The fact of being away from London in a remote place appealed to me hugely – I’d spent my gap year in Nepal and trekked in the middle of nowhere in the Himalayas.”

He has now trekked a fair bit on Cumbria’s fells and has swum regularly in Derwentwater, particularly during the recent Indian summer.

Richard comes from an army family and his childhood home was variously in Germany and Kuwait. He went to a boarding school at seven and did little acting until, aged 17, he played Marcellus in an open-air production of Hamlet.

No one can claim that Marcellus has a lot to do; he sees the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the battlements of Elsinore and gets to say “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Then he exits, never to be seen again. But Marcellus pushed Richard towards a career on the stage and he spent much of his university days at Durham (maths) and York (philosophy) as a performer. He then trained for the theatre.

He was Hamlet’s understudy in that school show but has since played the prince himself many times in a production that toured the world, including China, an experience he describes as phenomenal. “We performed sometimes with subtitles but some in the audience had enough English to understand the play. Chinese people love Shakespeare. I think they have more busts of him in each university city than we have in the entire country. They revere him even more than we do.”

Richard reveres him quite a bit too, has played many Shakespeare parts and acted with Dame Judi Dench, Theatre by the Lake’s Patron, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a production directed by Sir Peter Hall. “I had this idea that, when working with Judi, everything about acting would fall into place. But there’s nothing concrete about what she does - her technique is in her bones.”

Richard’s experience with Shakespeare has proved very useful at Theatre by the Lake for his role as Taliesin the bard in the world première of Benjamin Askew’s The Lady of the Lake, a play about King Arthur and his successor written entirely in verse.

“I’ve always very much enjoyed working with verse and was very excited when the script arrived. It has been a fantastic opportunity to work on something unlike anything I have ever worked on before. It’s a complicated play and one that I’ll be discovering things about right up to the last performance. It operates on so many different levels.

“Having the blank canvas a new play offers is very liberating. There is no previous concept you are trying to escape from.”

Like all summer season actors at Theatre by the Lake, Richard appears in three different plays and his trio, all in the Studio, have very few laughs. In Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, he plays George whose cousin has died brutally while on holiday in Spain. “He’s not the most sympathetic character but he’s a lot more complicated than he might at first appear. He tries to do his best but he does seem to miss the point quite a lot.”

In Shelagh Stephenson’s Enlightenment, he is Adam, a disturbed young man who assumes the identity of a backpacker missing in Indonesia. “It’s a play that has the potential to be quite different at every performance. Adam is so in the moment that I could potentially change the show every night – though I don’t.

“Have I a favourite among the three plays? I really wouldn’t be able to choose between them. They are all wonderful pieces and I would gladly do the entire season on any one of them.”

Off stage, Richard enjoys cooking and takes what he describes as culinary experiments to the theatre for his colleagues to try; he also plays the violin and the piano to relax. “And I had an idea that I would do a bit of sketching while I was here and I’m still hoping to do that before I leave in November.”

Suddenly Last Summer and Enlightenment run at Keswick's Theatre by the Lake until November.

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