The path to National Treasureland is no paved highway. Simon Russell Beale, the finest classical actor of his generation, was nearly lost to academia (he swerved a PhD in Victorian literature), and faced down pigeon-holing from an agent who wanted to change his name to Simon Beagle, the better to capitalise on a knack for dopily jolly comedy roles. Now – and not before time – he’s written an elegant study of Shakespeare that does double duty as a juicy actor’s autobiography.
The pleasure here is in the mix of green room gossip and literary insight. There’s plenty of the former: dining next to Lauren Bacall at the chat show queen Barbara Walters’s place? Good. Watching Top Gun with Imelda Staunton and Penny Downie? Even better. But Beale’s heart is in the text and in particular the great Shakespearean roles, 18 of them (including Iago, Richards II and III, Macbeth, Prospero, Lear and Hamlet), that he’s taken on since his first gig at the RSC in 1985.
Beale sounds a bit bashful about building a book around character criticism (he points out that the fussier kind of academic regards the practice as ‘almost improper’), but he really shouldn’t let such fashions concern him. His dalliance with Victoriana notwithstanding, he’s got the chops to be a scholarly early modernist, and he structures the book like a performer’s Plutarch, a collection of parallel lives that produces some unexpected juxtapositions: Macbeth and Benedick in a chapter on ‘Love and Marriage’; Prospero and Richard II as ‘Two Autocrats’. Julius Caesar’s Cassius and Twelfth Night’s Malvolio are rarely considered together, but an actor who has played them both within a space of a few years can see the linking threads.
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