Kathy goes a stage beyond

If I had been around 100 years ago, I would have been a male impersonator in the music halls, says Kathy Burke. Instead, the 21st century's answer to Vesta Tilley has strutted her trousered stuff as the smaller, but stroppier, half of that wonderfully dopey duo Kevin and Perry for the delectation of the telly-watching nation.

"It's a great liberation for a woman to play a man's role: I've been asked to play a couple of blokes on telly since Perry, and I was quite flattered, really. I said no because physically it's quite painful, know what I mean?" she adds, miming an excruciating clamp-down in the chest area. "But I wouldn't mind doing a love scene with Julie Walters because she's so brilliant; I would be the geezer, then we could swap over."

Quite apart from the sell-out potential of a snogathon between those two national treasures Burke and Walters, it would be tragic if this multiple-award-winner gave up full-time acting, as she's currently threatening.

But destiny beckons, for there's more to Burke than a genius for playing pinched-faced waifs and right old slappers. When her mentor Mai Zetterling discovered the 17-year-old Islingtonian back in 1982 and directed her in Scrubbers, she advised Burke not to get trapped for ever in the comedy roles but to write and direct as well. Kathy had inherited the gift of the gab - "my language would shock a docker, my brother John is always tutting at me" - from her Irish labourer father, who died of cancer in 1994.

By the age of 22, she had already written her first play, Mr Thomas, which she directed four years later at the Old Red Lion with Ray Winstone in the title role of a closet homosexual. Winstone was in the bit-part wilderness at the time and Burke had been out of work for nine months - the only blip in a consistently successful 19-year career that even weathered a booze problem in her twenties. "Mr Thomas was Ray's first gay part, but it didn't bother him - not in the slightest.

He got off on the dialogue and said to me, 'This is the first thing I've seen that reads like I talk.' "

Gay themes continue for what she regards as her first "proper" directing job, a step up from pub-theatre productions, with Jonathan Harvey's latest play, Out in the Open, at Hampstead.

"I have to face up to the fact that I enjoy directing more than acting," she admits. "I love getting good companies, kindred spirits, together. I would like to let the directing take over, though I don't think I'll completely give up on the acting. I'd love to work with Harry [Enfield] and Paul [Whitehouse] in future, but I was getting bored with the characters in the sketch shows."

The kindred spirit in this case is Harvey, her soulmate ever since she directed his play Boom Bang-a-Bang at the Bush seven years ago. Harvey wrote the fag-hag role of fright-wigged Linda in his odd-couple sitcom, Gimme Gimme Gimme, specifically for Burke, who begins filming a third series of the show for BBC2 this June.

"I love him; he tolerates me. If Jonathan weren't gay, I'd probably be crying all the time from unrequited love. He's so funny; I love that, it's very sexy. And even our birthdays are on the same day: 13 June. We're both Geminis. When Jonathan was deciding who should direct Boom Bang-a-Bang, he read his horoscope in the Standard and it said 'Go for the outside choice'. So he went for me; that's the cute little camp story about how we got together."