Over the years I have read many books by actors describing their adventures with, and thoughts about, Shakespeare: Michael Pennington, Antony Sher, Judi Dench and Oliver Ford Davies to name but a few. The durability, topicality and humanity of Shakespeare is an endlessly fascinating subject. So naturally, having seen Simon Russell Beale on stage many times, in a wide range of roles including a lot of Shakespeare, I pounced on A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories which was published in 2024.
When I interview actors, as I often do, I generally ask as an opener “So where did all this start? At school? At home?” and that’s pretty much where Russell Beale begins in this book which is partly an autobiography. He played, we learn King Lear at school (Clifton College, Bristol) before going to Cambridge to read English but also as a choral scholar at Gonville and Caius because, as he grew up, music was always central to his life. He had been a chorister at St Pauls before Clifton College. No one in his medically inclined family was bothered about his decision not to be a doctor and his being gay was a non-issue both at home and at school. His father was an army medic so the family – he has three brothers, a sister and a sister who died when she was four – moved around a lot.
He seems to have been in work almost full time since he left Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he started on a singing course but soon switched to drama as his family had always expected. Thereafter followed decades of work with the RSC and then National Theatre. He has enjoyed long working relationships with directors Sam Mendes and Nick Hytner and speaks very warmly of Gregory Doran. The work has led to world tours, off-Broadway, Broadway and a Knighthood from the late Queen in 2019. He has a CBE too although he doesn’t mention either of these in this book.
He comes across as a modest man and mentions more than once that he has always been overweight and that lithe movement has never been his forte although he is very funny (and incredulous) about his ballet role as the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Royal Opera House. At the beginning of his career he tended to be cast in comic roles and Shakespeare’s “clowns” (he’s interesting on the meaning of that word, then and now) tend to speak prose so it was a long time before he was offered a full- blown verse-speaking role.
He was unlikely casting as Ariel in The Tempest, a production I saw in 1993, so he and Mendes and the designer, had to do something different with it. When he played Prospero in 2016 (I saw that too) it was time to think again. He regards Prospero as a manipulative failure. He probably wasn’t attending to his duties which he why he was ousted and dumped on the mysterious island.
He has also played Hamlet (having years ago done Second Grave digger), Macbeth, Lear, Leontes, Richard II, Falstaff and many more. There has been some film and TV but he is more at home on stage. His account of the closet scene in Hamlet is fascinating. Imagine what’s going on the head of a young (?) man who tells his mother she’s too old to be having sex with anyone let alone her new husband who was, until recently, her brother-in-law.
Russell Beale mentions dozens of plays and characters in the course of this book, as you’d expect. But he never makes assumptions about reader knowledge. He gives a brief run down on the plot of every play he discusses and I, for one, was glad of the information about Timon of Athens one of the few Shakespeare plays I have neither seen nor read.
He has worked in plays by other playwrights too, of course and is fascinated by Chekhov. There was a fabulous, unforgettable production of Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist at National Theatre. It is almost a farce and in this astonishingly slick production was hilariously funny. “All these fucking stairs” commented so-star Alex Jennings sotto voce during one performance, apparently, as they dashed up them with Lesley Manville. Yes. Russell Beale is happy to share a few gossipy bits. I enjoyed his account of the US tradition of any great actor who happens to be “in” for a show popping back stage afterwards to wish you well. Hence Paul Newman materialising in your dressing room or Dustin Hoffman buying you all a drink.
Then there was Candide in which Russell Beale played Voltaire and narrated the piece which is one of Bernstein’s best scores, although it has a troubled production history. It is one of the few musicals which Russell Beale has done and he doesn’t – despite his background – reckon much on his own singing even as King Arthur in Spamalot. The fact that he is a musician as well as an actor led, however, to two BBC series: one on sacred music and one on symphonies.
It’s an informative, warmly accessible book in which the reader meets an actor who manages to be self-effacing as well as at the very top of his game. I learned a lot about how an actor of this calibre works with directors and designers. The doctor siblings, now with families of their own, provide the solidarity of ordinary family life and seem to keep him rather appealingly grounded.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
