THEO Fraser Steele is a man of parts - rather a lot of them, writes DAVID WARD. This summer at Keswick he plays two roles in Alan Bennett’s Single Spies and three in a stage version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

But that’s only half the story. In Jeeves and Wooster In Perfect Nonsense, a laugh-a-minute show based on a PG Wodehouse novel, he takes on five characters - three men (including Bertie Wooster’s gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves) and two dotty young women, with frequent switches between all of them. At one point, he becomes two characters simultaneously, has a conversation with himself and usually wins a big round of applause from an audience crying with laughter.

All this bonkers activity can sometime cause an identity crisis, especially in the Wooster play, which is likely to be this year’s Theatre by the Lake word-of-mouth hit. “The show is settling in now but at first I’d come off and ask ‘Who am I?’ and the back stage team would say ‘Gussie to Jeeves’ or ‘Jeeves to Stiffy.’ And then I’d know who I was.”

He has multiple costume changes, one of them completed in just nine seconds, although Theo is reluctant to spell out exactly how it’s done: “Let’s just say a lot goes on with magnets.” Not to mention a curtain and a lampshade.

This is Theo’s first summer season at Theatre by the Lake and he is clearly enjoying himself. “I haven’t had time to swim in the lake or go on any big walks yet but I think it’s absolutely beautiful here. The walk down the path to the theatre has an extraordinary view of the fells and I expect to see Julie Andrews coming over the top of a hill in her wimple.”

Relaxation time was short when we met because Theo was acting by night and rehearsing by day for Single Spies, a double bill about two of the five notorious Cambridge spies; it opened last week. In the first play, An Englishman Abroad, Theo plays Guy Burgess, the very gay, very flamboyant and often very drunk spy who fled to Moscow with Donald Maclean in 1951; in the second, A Question of Attribution, he is Chubb, a dour MI5 officer who interrogates Anthony Blunt, the man Burgess signed up as spy and who later became the keeper of the Queen’s pictures.

Theo has warmed to Burgess. “The thing I didn’t realise about him was just how clever he was. He was one of the brightest men in his year at Cambridge and was picked out because of that. A lot of the reason he got as far as he did in the BBC and the Foreign Office was because he was so bright. His Russian handler said that he was the cleverest man he had ever met.”

Theo, originally from Essex, trained in London and at 23 found himself working with Bill Nighy and Stella Gonet in Richard Eyre’s production of David Hare’s Skylight at the National Theatre. More recently, he spent almost a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing a range of parts in the 2016 Stratford-upon-Avon season.

He has had many other stage roles in London and the regions, performed in films and many radio plays and, In The Thick Of It on television, played an MP’s son who was shoved up against a wall and subjected to a torrent of abuse by the foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi, later Dr Who).

He wanted to come to Keswick because of the plays and those ten parts he was offered in them. But it has meant being away for seven months from his family and the very successful delicatessen he runs with his wife in Hackney, east London. “We didn’t choose to do it - we sort of fell into it. It started with just me. We now own the business and have a staff of 12,” said Theo.

If you fancy some rather fine fresh, seasonal and organic fruit and vegetables, British and Continental cheeses, pies and sausage rolls, you know where to go. But the man behind the counter may not be what he seems.

Jeeves and Wooster In Perfect Nonsense and Single Spies are now playing in repertory until early November. Sense and Sensibility opens on August 11.