For his first stage role in two years the actor is playing AE Housman in The Invention of Love and Edward Elgar in Alan Bennett’s new film — but he still has impostor syndrome
Simon Russell Beale is one of our greatest classical actors but he never lets it look like hard work. He can turn anyone from King Lear to Prospero, from Hamlet to Falstaff, into a guy it’s a delight to spend an evening with. And when he’s not been tackling Shakespeare over the past 40 years he’s often also been making the verbal gyrations of Tom Stoppard feel like a doddle.
He got his first Tony award nomination in 2004 for playing a moral philosopher with marriage problems in a revival of Stoppard’s Jumpers. But his new role in The Invention of Love is a different level of challenge. Stoppard’s much-loved 1997 play puts the Oxford academic and poet AE Housman in the afterlife, then bombards its audience with wit, wisdom and enough classical allusions to sink a trireme.
You’d have thought that, aged 63, a knight of the realm since 2019 and a Tony winner in 2022 (for The Lehman Trilogy), this critics’ darling would be far beyond suffering from impostor syndrome…