The celebrated actor has long struggled with the murder and dismemberment at the heart of Titus Andronicus. Now, at 64, he is finally tackling a play that ‘teeters on the edge of acceptability’ – but he’s made a few changes
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….