WATCH It, Sailor!, now playing at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, is a rollicking, laugh-a-minute comedy about a wedding that goes wrong - but it has a heroine who could give Lady Macbeth a run for her money, writes David Ward.

Emma Hornett may not actually kill anyone in the course of three acts but you get the feeling she is only one rage away from reaching for her rolling pin and shattering several skulls.

She is a bully and a tyrant; she is anti-laughter and anti-drink. As her soon-to-be son-in-law Albert tells her when at the end of his tether: “You just love hating everything and everybody except Emma bloody Hornett.” The hating, by the way, also includes cats.

“She’s a battle-axe and a dragon,” admits Heather Phoenix who plays her (and is, according to the Observer, “redoubtable in the role”). “She’s a familiar comedy figure that we all recognise, someone who is always put together with a hen-pecked, long-suffering husband.”

But Heather, now into her fourth summer season and 14th production at Theatre by the Lake, finds much more to her than that. Playing a broad comedy character such as Emma requires considerable technical skill and she prepared for the part in exactly the same way she would approach a complex heroine in Shakespeare or Ibsen.

“Emma may well be flawed, as people are, but she is human and people are who they are for a reason. Beneath her formidable exterior lies a beating heart. What matters to her is family, particularly her daughter Shirley, who is the apple of her eye, and keeping up appearances in front of the neighbours.

“Much as her family drives her mad, woe betide anyone outside the family who says anything against them.”

Heather is convinced that, once the wedding hitches are over, she will defend to the death Albert, whom she berates for most of the play.

Heather has come back to Keswick this year partly because it’s the final season of artistic director Ian Forrest, who is moving on after 18 years. But she also loves Theatre by the Lake’s summer season in which 14 actors stay in the town for seven months, each of then appearing in three of the six plays performed in the Main House and Studio.

“I get this fantastic opportunity to play very different characters in three contrasting plays. This theatre has such a heart to it - it’s like coming home, coming back to a family. I never tire of being here.

“The production values here are second to none. People who have not been here before are bowled over when they come. No wonder everyone wants to work here.”

When not playing fearsome Emma, Heather retreats 2,500 years to become a member of the chorus in Elektra, the intense tragedy by Greek playwright Sophokles, which is directed by Mary Papapdima, who is also Greek.

“Mary understands how these plays were performed all those years ago. They are part of her heritage and culture. So in rehearsals we could ask Mary anything - who is this god? what’s a libation? - and she could explain. And she could also tell us how to pronounce the characters’ names.”

Heather’s final play is The Rivals, the sparkling Regency comedy by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in which she plays Lucy the maid. “She’s great fun, the go-between who delivers the letters and goes in for a bit of saucy flirting. She’s a person who pretends to be simple but is actually as sharp as a pin.

“The period costumes designed by Martin Johns are stunning. The dressmaker who is making mine told me at my fitting that there are far fewer opportunities now to work on costumes like these, so she was equally delighted.”

Heather, who plays enough instruments to be able to create her own one-woman band, has been acting for more than 25 years. But after school she trained as a secretary, with a shorthand speed of 120 words a minute, and worked in the department of Russian at the University of Nottingham, her home town. Determined both to get a degree and to fulfil a secret wish to be an actor, she moved on to Manchester University to study drama.

Aware that few actors are in work all the time, she has developed a parallel role as a voice and speech coach (PhoenixVoice.com), helping anyone who wants to speak with greater confidence and clarity.

“It was important to me to find something that I liked doing, am skilled at and get fulfilment from. As an actor, it puts you into a much better place mentally to be able to do other things. If you are just sitting at home waiting for another job, it’s pretty desperate. So now I have two careers.”

Theatre by the Lake’s summer season runs until November.

Box office 017687-74411.