Simon Russell Beale finds it scary to play Shakespeare’s high-status characters, “the sort where you walk on stage and everyone bows”. It is surprising, given he is one of the nation’s foremost theatre actors, a king of his own realm, but also ironic because he has played most of Shakespeare’s alpha-men already: from Hamlet and Lear to Macbeth, Prospero and a brace of Richards.
Still, they’re difficult, he insists. “I think you need a huge amount of confidence.”
Which he doesn’t have? “I don’t think any of us do, completely, do we?”
Russell Beale is famously diffident. Sitting in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal studios in London, he has an almost contradictory air of being easy, affable yet gimlet-eyed, both at home with himself and not. At the age of 64, and with an accumulation of the most illustrious parts across stage and screen, as well as an armful of accolades (three Oliviers, a Tony, two Baftas and, notably, a knighthood), is he not prepared to acknowledge his kingliness?
It would seem not. He speaks of never watching himself on screen, thinking a performance is not quite good enough, occasionally conceding “Oh that’s all right”. But alongside the perfectionism and picking at his performances is an unquenched appetite for work in general, and what he calls a “limitless field of exploration” in Shakespeare’s plays in particular.
So comprehensive is his grounding in Shakespeare that even his family thought he had already played the titular Roman general from Titus Andronicus. “They were getting it mixed up with Timon of Athens. Another member of my family said to me: ‘Why have you decided to do it?’”
It’s a good question. Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest works: even the Greeks might have winced at its graphic brutality. The play features rape, murder and dismemberment (hands, head, tongue), culminating in an eye-watering finale where a mother unknowingly eats a pie made from her dead children’s flesh. Titus is caught in this cycle of violence. Another actor might relish its baroque darkness – “Brian Cox said to me: ‘It’s a marvellous play’” – but for Russell Beale it brings challenging questions. “There are certain plays in the canon that teeter on the edge of acceptability. Titus is one of those for me. I don’t understand the violence. I don’t understand why as an audience we feel excited, stimulated, challenged by it; it’s so relentless.”
One of Shakespeare’s earliest and most maligned works, the play was rehabilitated in the 20th century, increasing in popularity along with the rise in real-world conflict. The RSC’s billing suggests this production, directed by Max Webster, will talk to the violence of our own age, its action refracted through “the lens of 21st-century aggression”.
Russell Beale hints at the graphic nature of violence it will bring. “There’s a drain round the side of the stage. I find that almost more horrifying than anything. It reminds me of the prisons in Syria when Assad fell, and stories of people going into the rooms where people were tortured.”
He has never been good with watching physical violence. “The gouging of eyes in King Lear always makes me feel sick, watching Lavinia in Titus Andronicus come on with no hands is just appalling. But, but, but … We watch it. I’ve done plays about grief and love and death, but not about violence. It’s a very particular component in our makeup as human beings, that we are both attracted and repelled by it. That’s what I’m trying to work out.”
Russell Beale is scholarly in his knowledge of Shakespeare’s canon, providing analysis of everything from the warring in Troilus and Cressida (he played Thersites in a 1990 production directed by Sam Mendes, with Ralph Fiennes as Troilus), to the demand for revenge in Hamlet (“My Hamlet was absolutely paralysed by that request from his father”).
Russell Beale maintains a healthy respect for the bard’s written word – describing himself as a “semi-purist” in terms of the script itself. “I do think it is worth acknowledging that these plays are mostly written in verse, therefore you have to have a rudimentary understanding of that verse. It’s not rocket science – de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum. If you observe the verse form, acting it is easier. What I do, and what I would advise another actor to do, is to mark it up as you’re learning it and then forget about it. When you’ve learned it in that rhythm, you can play as many curveballs as you like.”
Clarity for the audience is paramount, he holds, and to that end, Russell Beale – shock horror! – changes bits of Shakespearean text to make it understandable to modern ears. So he substitutes a word such as “wanting” to its modern meaning of “lacking” in a certain context, or “lazar” to “leper”.
“I’ve changed a few things in this play – just single words – and I’ve occasionally changed the structure of a sentence that is the wrong way around. This happened a lot in Timon. I swapped them round just to make it easier. I think in 200 years, Shakespeare’s work probably will be rewritten. We don’t read Chaucer in the original Middle English. So it’s part of the natural evolution of a text. The point is, as with Chaucer, the script will always be there. From the moment Shakespeare put those plays on stage, people were adapting them.” This view may resonate – or otherwise – with those involved in the (always heated) cultural debate on whether the bard’s texts should be updated for modern-day understanding, or left categorically untouched in their original state, as is argued by purists such as the former National Theatre director Richard Eyre.
While Russell Beale might be best associated with theatre, screen work has always ticked along beside live performance, from his role as the Soviet politician Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria in Armando Iannucci’s 2017 political satire The Death of Stalin, to his 2022 turn in the Thor film franchise, Love and Thunder. So is the case now: this year he is appearing in the third film in the Downton Abbey franchise and in The Choral, a new Alan Bennett-scripted film set during the first world war and directed by Nicholas, in which he is cast alongside Fiennes.
What roles remain for him on stage? Angelo, from Measure for Measure, he says, without much hesitation. He is a puritanical old judge who falls for a novice nun and so his life is upturned by this sudden romantic passion. “I love the idea of an older man who has been impeccably behaved all his life to just fall in lust with a young woman and know in his heart of hearts it is ridiculous – that awful sense that he knows she’s 20, and yet the first and last thing he thinks about is her.”
Russell Beale has spoken frankly about the absence of a romantic partner in his life and now reflects on what other kind of love fills that breach. “It’s interesting that I’ve ended up living near my family” – his father, in his 90s, is still alive, and Russell Beale is the eldest of five living siblings – “I think that’s the great love of my life: siblings.” I wouldn’t know what to do without them. I have occasional nightmares about what happens if they’re no longer around. Luckily, I’m the oldest and the most unhealthy so with any luck I’ll go first!”
The absence of romantic love does not perturb him in the way that it used to. In the past, he has spoken of love and single life as a gay man. He says now: “If you’d asked me about 20 years ago, I would have gone ‘Damn’ or ‘Where is it?’” What if a late flowering love did turn up out of the blue, as it did for Angelo? It would be lovely, he says, but, after a pause: “Imagine the change of lifestyle … Reorganising his books: where’s he” – a hypothetical romantic partner – “going to put them? I love the idea of married couples living in their own separate houses!”
Sometime later, he returns to Angelo: “Perhaps I should have a word with Nick [Hytner] about Measure for Measure.” Spoken with the bearing of a true king of the Shakespearean stage. Let’s hope Hytner says yes.
• Titus Andronicus is at Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 17 April to 7 June
