Simon Russell Beale on Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Titus

Called “the finest actor of his generation,” Sir Simon Russell Beale has played just about everyone in Shakespeare’s canon—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff, Malvolio, Iago—and most recently, Titus Andronicus, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In this episode, Beale reflects on the Shakespearean roles that have shaped his career and how his approach has evolved over time.

Beale shares what drew him to Titus, and how he found surprising tenderness in Shakespeare’s brutal tragedy. The actor revisits past performances, exploring grief in Hamlet, aging and dementia in King Lear, and how time has deepened his connection to the plays and the characters.

Drawing from his moving and often humorous memoir, A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories, Beale reflects on acting, Shakespeare, and the power of performance to reveal something essential about being human.

Sir Simon Russell Beale studied at Cambridge before joining the RSC. Described by the Daily Telegraph as “the finest actor of his generation,” he has been lauded for both his stage and TV work, winning many awards including the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Evening Standard Best Actor Award, and the BAFTA Best Actor Award.

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From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 17, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: The actor Sir Simon Russell Beale has a seriously impressive range. He’s played not only Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, and Lear, but also Malvolio and Falstaff.

[CLIP from the BBC series, The Hollow Crown. Simon Russell Beale plays Falstaff.]

FALSTAFF: That thou art my son I am partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the point: why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at?

KARIM-COOPER: Beale made his film debut in Sally Potter’s Orlando as the Earl of Moray; played Rachel Weisz’s older husband in The Deep Blue Sea; and has appeared in not one but two satires about Joseph Stalin: the stage play Collaborators and Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin.

[CLIP from the 2017 film, The Death of Stalin. Simon Russell Beale is Lavrentiy Beriya.]

BERIYA: Goodbye, Molotov, old friend. Goodbye forever. You’re on the list. It would be simpler and cheaper if they just drove straight into a river.

He’s won three Olivier Awards, two BAFTAs, and a Tony for best actor for his role as Henry Lehman in The Lehman Trilogy.

[CLIP from the 2019 production of The Lehman Trilogy, directed by Sam Mendes. Simon Russell Beale is Henry Lehman.]

LEHMAN: He had been dreaming of America. Three brothers, travellers, immigrants. They came with nothing. Not even a word of English. And they built an entire universe.

Now, Beale has written a memoir, A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories.

Here’s Simon Russell Beale speaking with Barbara Bogaev. They began their conversation by talking about Beale’s most recent part: the title role in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of my favorite play, Titus Andronicus.

—————————-

BARBARA BOGAEV: It’s such an extremely violent play, and it’s problematic violence, I mean, on a lot of levels for modern audiences. I’m especially thinking of the victim blaming with Titus killing his own daughter for the shame of her rape. But, I don’t know, there’s a lot of violence I could talk about. But anyway, what made you want to do it?

SIMON RUSSELL BEALE: I think precisely that, actually. I think precisely the trying to finesse that type of violence on stage. It is interesting doing it over the last eight weeks. Of course, you open the papers every day and you think, “Who are we fooling?” The violence that we see in Titus—you know, I was reading about a woman who lost all her nine children in a bomb attack—and you think, “Well, you know, we could turn our faces away from this or we can face it and go, this is what happens to people.” It was about how to present that. Inevitably, you aestheticize it by presenting it, so, however it’s presented, it is sort of an aestheticization, you know? But how to make it genuinely shocking? The play changes radically as soon as we see Lavinia, mutilated and raped. It’s like what becomes—sort of what was Grand Guignol, what was sort of almost black humor—becomes deadly serious, and I think that’s fascinating.

BOGAEV: There is that turn to grief, too, for Titus—

BEALE: Yeah, absolutely.

BOGAEV: —which is so interesting in that kind of alpha male.

BEALE: Yes, and the concomitant—I was about to say, you call it grief and I call it love—suddenly, he looks at his daughter—and a daughter he’s probably ignored, as you say, he’s that type of man, high patriarch, 25 sons who got most of his attention—and this daughter, there’s an amazing moment when she’s presented to him, and my sister, it’s usually a brother, but in this case it’s my sister, says, “This was your daughter.” and Titus replies, “Why, Marcia, so she is.” It’s in that moment I think that he’s not going to turn away and he’s going to—he finds this love absolutely welling up, and, as you say, grief and guilt, you know.

BOGAEV: Right, he offers to chop off his own hands.

BEALE: Yes, and in fact, of course, eventually does have his hand chopped off. I see that as absolutely his sign to her that he’s willing to, he wants to, share in her suffering.

BOGAEV: Right, because they were of no use in sparing her—

BEALE: Yeah.

BOGAEV: —in saving her.

BEALE: Yes, exactly, exactly that. It’s a payment for his sense of responsibility for her.

You mentioned the death at the end. It is very troubling that line when I say to the emperor, “Would it be right to kill my daughter because she’s been raped?” and he says, “Yes, it would because it’ll end her shame.”

Of course, in our production, I cannot accept that and he doesn’t, my Titus. He sort of shrugs that off as a conventional male response. She has agreed she wants to die, so, between us, we go, “This life is not worth it anymore.” It’s a sort of mutual pact, and so, she gives me the knife to kill her. I think that’s a much more—it’s very, very sad, but it’s much more dignified—is that the word?

BOGAEV: Humane.

BEALE: Yes, humane, we got the same word at the same time. Yes, humane reading.

Actually, if you look at them in a sort of way, I think there is a point in people’s lives sometimes when they go, “This is just not worth it.” I think both of them look at each other, father and daughter, and they have sort of lost their minds with the grief.  A friend of mine said—he played Titus—he said, “It’s grief upon grief, upon grief.” A piling of grief. I think both of them decide that it is no longer worth it.

BOGAEV: From the sublime to maybe not quite the ridiculous, but the practical. Just as a practical matter, there’s all the stage blood to deal with. Where does it go in your production? And how do you keep it off the audience? And how do you get it off you after that horrific scene in which you cut off a hand? I’m thinking you have to take a shower behind the scenes.

BEALE: I’m endlessly showering at the moment. On a matinee day, it’s five showers in a day, which it’s a bit excessive. My skin’s getting drier and drier and drier, which is probably why I look so old in the photographs.

BOGAEV: You must moisturize.

BEALE: Must moisturize. [Both laugh.]

Max Webster who directed it, as you know, and of whom I’m a huge fan, he had this thing very early on of—well, first of all, he showed us a set and there’s a drain around it and you think, “Right. Okay.”

BOGAEV: How did you feel when you saw that?

BEALE: Well, it’s an indication of where we’re moving.

There’s also a glass, sort of small, foot high, perhaps two feet high, glass barrier, so the audience—who do get occasionally spattered—are sort of protected.

BOGAEV: Oh, I think we call that a splash zone.

BEALE: A splash zone, yes. So, when we saw the set, we thought, “Oh, right, here’s a splash zone.”

What’s clever about the blood is that it’s all at a distance. It’s rather difficult to explain, but when people are stabbed, they’re not in close contact. So, a person makes a gesture of a stab and the blood appears on the stabbed person’s stomach or whatever.

When my hand is cut off, there literally is a hose of blood, a hose attached to the ceiling, which just pours down. And the final horrific banquet where everyone dies, again, there are people coming on with hoses, so, it’s interesting because it’s not naturalistic, but it’s still pretty horrific. It’s odd. It still works as a sort of expression of violence.

BOGAEV: Wow. I was reading some of the reviews, very positive reviews, and they do mention how the contemporary costumes and the production elements and staging all resonate with, as you were saying earlier, with the horrors of current wars, with Guantanamo, and thinking of Syria, and Iran, and Gaza. But how deliberate is that on your part? And in rehearsals, how do you approach the question of overt references to current crises or wars?

BEALE: Oh, I think the references are done by the audiences. I mean, there’s nothing we do, nothing

BOGAEV: And that’s by design, right?

BEALE: I think that’s by design. I mean, oddly enough, the costumes are very, very anonymous actually. What they do is—why you mentioned Guantanamo, of course—is that Rome is being attacked by an army of Goths, as you know. The Goths are defeated and brought in as prisoners of war. So, they wear those sort of, I suppose you call them jumpsuits, but they’re the sort of things you’d wear in Guantanamo Bay. So, I suppose there is a, sort of, not deliberate reference, but you know, people would read that.

As for the victorious Romans, they’re all dressed absolutely in gray suits. It sounds very boring, but it’s actually beautiful and rather elegant. They’re top dogs. They’re a highly patriarchal society, rigid, self-righteous, convinced of its own worth. Whereas the Goths are a little bit more expressive in the way they dress. But it’s not, I don’t think the designer or Max wanted to specifically lead the eye to a particular, you know, Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Guantanamo, you know.

BOGAEV:  So, you’re allowing the audience to fill in with their imagination? Because, I mean, that’s where productions go wrong when it gets too specific.

BEALE: Too specific. It’s interesting that when we started talking, we’re fooling ourselves that it’s not everywhere, this horror, and therefore, to pinpoint one particular horror would be sort of almost insulting, wouldn’t it? It’s everywhere. I don’t think there was a need to say, “This is in a specific place.”

The other thing, of course, is what’s so typically Shakespearean, of course, is it’s an entirely invented Rome, or it’s entirely invented Roman history, isn’t it? So, we don’t even have to give a nod to the real Julius Caesar or the real Coriolanus. It’s complete nonsense as history.

BOGAEV: Well, Titus is directed by Max Webster, as you say, and you’ve collaborated with director Sam Mendes in so many Shakespeare productions. You’ve called him your professional soulmate. One of the productions you talk about in your book is Twelfth Night, and I want to talk about it now.

BEALE: [laughter]

BOGAEV: Yes, Malvolio, the officious steward who runs the household for the very imperious noble woman, Olivia. Tell me about the idea Mendes had for Malvolio that he discussed with you before rehearsals.

BEALE: [laughter]

BOGAEV: About the forged love letter.

BEALE: Yes, yes. Well, we met in a hotel in Covent Garden in London. We had a drink and he was just throwing ideas around which he used to do with me, but usually over the phone actually. But this time we met and he had this idea. He said he didn’t want to set the famous scene when Malvolio discovers the letter, the fake letter written to him ostensibly by Olivia but actually a forgery which sends him into a spiral of excitement—

BOGAEV: Ecstasy.

BEALE: Ecstasy, absolute ecstasy. It’s usually set in a garden and he wanted to set it in Malvolio’s bedroom. It’s just one of those ideas where you go, “Oh yes, of course.”

BOGAEV: Because it says Olivia’s in love with him.

BEALE: Yes, quite.

BOGAEV: His mistress, who he adores—

BEALE: Adores—and of course, it’s his private space.

BOGAEV: So, you’re in the bedroom instead of the garden, and he’s reading this letter so it’s like we have this window into Malvolio alone.

BEALE: Yes, he’s got a single bed and he’s gone up for an afternoon nap. I wanted to know why with the bedroom? Why is he in the bedroom? Well, he’s gone up for an afternoon nap. He’s allowed 20 minutes where he can have a little lie down from his very heavy duties as a steward. He’s lying down and there’s the letter. So, he’s lying in bed, or on a bed, so, his sexual fantasy become, yeah, colorful, as does his dreams of social advancement, which is the other thing Malvolio really looks for.

So, it gave him a type of, sort of—it was just sad. Again, I’m using the word a lot, “sad.” He was a man, a lonely man, a man who has his little tiny private space, and it’s not usually violated, but in this case, it’s violated by the audience and they see his vulnerability, I suppose, and his absurdity, of course.

One of the things I said to Sam at the time, the immediate thought that I had, was that he should have a private vice, you know? That he should drink alcohol, there should be a half bottle of vodka under the pillow, whatever, or pornography. Those were not suitable. But then I thought, “What about mint humbugs?”— which I don’t know whether you have in the States but they’re very hard mint sweets, I thought I could just be chewing those, and then I thought, “Actually, I can’t do a very long speech while chewing mint humbugs.”

BOGAEV: So, this is so wonderful because this one change of setting set off all these ideas in your mind about how to make this, he’s a stock character, Malvolio, but you’re giving dimension to this man. In this part of your memoir, you talk about how hard comedy is and that you had gotten some advice from a great comic actor about—

BEALE: Oh, do I? Remind me.

BOGAEV: Well, Simon, “Comedy only works when an actor believes absolutely in their character’s predicament and doesn’t signal to the audience that laughs are expected.”

BEALE: They always say, isn’t it, that the great cliche amongst actors is that you’ve got to, if you play comedy, you’ve got to play the situation correctly, and accurately, and naturalistically. And I think I say in the book, it’s almost true. Because, absolutely, if you don’t, if the audience doesn’t believe the situation, they’re not going to laugh. But equally, the great comic actors, you can see, they just have an added, I don’t know what it is, perhaps it’s an awareness of the absurdity of the world? Perhaps it’s pain? You know, great comedians are great explorers of human pain or human discomfort, you know.

I do say in the book—and it’s one of my favorite stories about comedy—about this married couple who acted for years together. They were doing a West End drawing-room comedy. She asks for a cup of tea, and she used to get a laugh. She loses the laugh through the run and she says to her husband, “I’m losing that laugh when I asked for the cup of tea.” And he says, “Ask for the cup of tea and not for the laugh.” And that’s, yeah, that’s good advice.

BOGAEV: So, it’s an anticipation that you have to get rid of in the line?

BEALE: Oh, I think once you’re in the middle of playing and you’re used to laughs then that’s the danger area because you start playing for the laugh. There’s bits in Titus, I mean, it’s a grim play, but there are laughs, there are bits. I’m very aware that I have to—I did it last night in the performance—sort of just turn it back, just remind yourself of why you are doing this and don’t worry about the audience response. Just one tiny line, I realized I was overplaying it, and you just have to slap yourself down a bit, start again, and then the laugh will come back eventually.

BOGAEV: Well, we started talking about this because I asked you about how you and Mendes work together, how you start. Where do you start with your preparation with a role?

BEALE: Well, with the big Shakespeares I think it’s about getting rid of preconceptions about the part. I mean, if we’re talking about Titus, I didn’t know that my Titus would be so loving. I think whether that’s right or wrong, I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but the idea that, you know, if you go in saying, “Oh, he’s a murderous, cold patriarch.” and you stick with that, you won’t get very far. But if you take in each individual tiny little moment from scratch, you might end up discovering things that you didn’t expect to discover.

It’s finding little details. For instance, again, going back to Titus, about five times he mentions his sight is going. “My sight begins to dazzle,” he says. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to take that little piece of information and make it literal that he actually does lose his sight, and by the end of it, he can’t really see.” You can explain it in all sorts of ways, like sort of a reaction to shock, but that’s not really the point. In my head, his eyes are going. I

t’s discoveries like that, and that’s a literal one, but there are emotional discoveries, you know. As I say about love, he suddenly has this overwhelming sense of love for his daughter which I didn’t expect if I’d gone in going, “Yeah, he’s hardhearted and he’s a warrior and all the rest of it.” So, that’s what I tried to do, wipe the slate clean and then start again.

BOGAEV: So, how do you do that with, say, another Mendes role that you played: Iago in Othello? Because you do have to answer that perennial question with that role, right? What are Iago’s motives, and what’s his end game? So, do you start there, and then go through the script looking for all of the details that build that into a human being, that detective work?

BEALE: Well, the thing about Iago is that all the details are completely unconvincing, I think, in terms of motive. I mean, they’re convincing enough.

BOGAEV: Well, I mean, he says right at the top—

BEALE: “I hate them all. I hate Othello. Yeah, he’s probably sleeping with my wife. And I hate Cassio.” And you think it piles on and on. You think, “Actually, you know something? None of those reasons quite convince.” It’s an accumulation. You are sort of plucking reasons out of the air. I suddenly realized that that was the point of what Shakespeare wrote, and it’s terrifying. This man has not got the makeup to understand love, or goodness, or light. He’s on a journey towards his own self-destruction.

I don’t think it’s conscious, but I think he knows halfway through the play that this particular plot is going somewhere very dangerous. I don’t think he starts out like that, but he realizes that he’s risking quite a lot, in fact, probably his own life, certainly his own career, by behaving like this. But he pushes it and then at the end that terrifying thing when he says, “I’m not going to speak anymore. From this time forth, I never will speak a word.” which,  of course, is exactly mirrored by Hamlet’s “The rest is silence.”

Interestingly enough, two of the largest parts in Shakespeare both end by saying, “I’m not going to talk anymore.” With Hamlet, it’s a sort of, “Thank god,  before dying” and with Iago, it’s like, “Okay, that’s my life over.” He’s not killed, of course, in the play, which is interesting. He’s not judicially murdered. But he says “That’s it. I’ve plumbed the depths of my own capacity for destruction.”

It’s interesting going through the little details, none of them convincing, and thinking, “What does that mean?”

BOGAEV: It’s such a bleak role in a bleak play. You folks traveled all over the world with that production. You write that by the time you got to New Zealand everyone was so exhausted that performances weren’t hitting anymore and there was a big problem. You asked Mendes to come give you notes. He couldn’t leave New York, where he was working on something big, but he did decide to help you get back on track from afar. I think this is so interesting. Anyway, tell us what he did.

BEALE: As a technique.

BOGAEV: Yes, tell us what he did.

BEALE: Well, just to go back a bit, we’d done, I think, three weeks in China, two weeks in Japan, two weeks in Korea. All fascinating places and an amazing experience. But of course, we were speaking English to a non-English speaking audience, so, I suspect that what happened over that long period is that we became lazier, perhaps. We became cruder.

Anyway, we arrived in New Zealand, and for the first time in this, you know, triumphant tour, we got bad reviews, and we thought, “Oh,” rather surprised.  So, we contacted Sam. Sam was doing Cabaret, actually his famous production of Cabaret in New York, and he said, “Look, I can’t fly across the States and the Pacific to come see you in New Zealand. I mean, that’s not going to work.”

So, he watched a video of it and he just gave us these little notes, which were nothing to do with the play itself, but just sort of little, odd ideas. Like he said, “When does Iago have his first drink of the day?” That was the one I remember. We never discussed whether Iago drank at all. I mean, there was a drinking scene. But, you know, suddenly the implication he might have a dependency on alcohol suddenly became, “Oh, ooh.” What we used to call a functional alcoholic. I don’t know whether we say that anymore, but I thought, “Okay, 11 o’clock in the morning, he has his little break in work, he has a whiskey.” And it just, I don’t know, it just made the psychology of him a little bit, it just went somewhere slightly different, and I enjoyed that.

Another one I remember was saying to one of the smaller parts who was the head of the military camp in Cyprus, which is where Othello and Desdemona end up, he says, “Does Mont—” he’s called Montano. He says, “Does Montano enjoy his job?” It’s a great note because that actor had to think, “Oh, god, does he?” He might be bored stiff or he might love it, you know, you just go wherever you want. It has no effect except for internally on you, and it just revitalizes the whole thing.

It was very clever. He said he got the technique from somebody else, but I hope that he invented it, really.

BOGAEV: It’s like a little cup of coffee. It kind of wakes you up to the character.

BEALE: Yes, a little espresso.

BOGAEV: A little espresso.

BEALE: Tiny, and it just diverts your mind into a different area. It’s very clever.

BOGAEV: Well, I have to ask you about your Lear, which I loved.

[CLIP from the 2014 production of National Theatre Live: King Lear, directed by Sam Mendes. Simon Russell Beale is King Lear.]

LEAR: Let it be so. Thy truth, then, be thy dower,
For by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be,
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity, and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this forever.
Peace, Kent.
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
I loved her most and thought to set my rest
On her kind nursery. [To Cordelia.] Hence and avoid
my sight!—

Mendes also cast you in this play. And you say that for the first time, you look to outside sources for clues to playing Lear, With all the other Shakespeare plays, you wouldn’t. You’d go straight to the text. So, specifically to answer the question of Lear’s madness, why did you make an exception for this play and who did you turn to?

BEALE: Well, I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare. I’ve done a lot of parts in which people are “mad,” you know. That wasn’t the case with Lear, but it was obvious that he was finding keeping his mind on track very, very difficult, and I thought, “That’s interesting.” It seemed to be a picture of a progression of a deteriorating mind.

So, I was sitting in the garden of my sister’s house. My young nephew was just starting as a very junior doctor and I said, “Do you think you could”—I’m completely hopeless with computers—so, I said, “Do you think you could look up on the internet and see whether anybody’s analyzed Lear from a psychiatric point of view or medical point of view?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, they have. There’s a doctor who’s analyzed his behavior as as a man suffering from Lewy body dementia.” Because all the sort of symptoms: hallucination, emotional ability, the need to cry or laugh or whatever too easily, inappropriate sexual language, all that was there. And I thought, “Okay, I’ll just use it as a guide.” It just gave me a little bit of information.

BOGAEV: To hang your decisions on. I’m thinking one very big decision that you made in that play was you solve the mystery of what happens to the Fool.

BEALE: Yes.

BOGAEV: In Act III, scene 6, that’s the last time we see the fool and then we never hear about him, or we don’t know what happens to him. But in this production, apparently in your delirium, you beat the Fool to death with a lead pipe.

BEALE: That was Sam’s idea. But it is interesting that the Fool disappears, and he doesn’t seem to be missed by anybody. He’s been there all the time up until that point with Lear, he never leaves his side really. And nobody says, “Oh, where’s the Fool?” He just sort of disappears in the script. And I think Sam wanted to mark it in some way and so he said, “What about in his delirium he beats him to death?”

I found it very moving that Lear has no recollection of it—that his not being mentioned becomes about nobody mentioning it and Lear can’t remember. Then right at the very end, as you know, when he’s looking at the body of his dead daughter, he just suddenly says, “My poor fool is hanged.” And I wanted the audience to think, “Oh, well, he wasn’t, was he?” and it’s just that Lear has momentarily created a different history. Yeah, sad.

BOGAEV: It’s sad.

BEALE: I’m using the word “sad” a lot at this interview, aren’t I?

BOGAEV: Well, sad—

BEALE: Sad.

BOGAEV: —yeah, sad, and then I’m going to move on to more sad. You’ve also played Hamlet, not with Sam Mendes, but with director John Caird. Sadly, it wasn’t long after your mother had died. How did that loss color your performance?

BEALE: Well, she knew I was going to do it. I think that’s what hurt most—of course, it wasn’t what hurt most, it was her death that hurt most—but I remember thinking, “Oh, the irony of her saying”—she had pancreatic cancer, and it was a very, very quick six months between the diagnosis and her death, she was very, very ill—“I will see it. I’ll make sure I live until then.”

Well, of course, it was devastating for all of us because she was a very wonderful woman, and, of course, we thought she was wonderful, and it was a horrible death, and it’s sort of, again, this is the blank canvas idea that I talked about at the beginning. As I went into Hamlet thinking, “I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what the specifics of his psychology are.” But, you know, I decided that he loved his father very, very much, as I loved my mother very, very much, and so, it was a softer relationship with his father than I had anticipated it being. And in fact, he was a sweeter prince, I think, than I’d anticipated him being.

On the first night, I put mum’s—I said to the cast, “Would you mind if I put my mother’s picture photograph just on the props table near the entrance, one of the entrances?” And they said, “Oh, no, go ahead.” And I didn’t feel nervous. It was very strange. I didn’t feel nervous. I just thought, “Right, Mom, I wish you’d had made this but you didn’t. But you are here and this is for you.”

Of course, it’s all about grief that play. It’s all about coping with it, whether you love the person or not. And they’re all different versions of it. But my version was that he loved his dead father, and he wanted to but he was unable to do what his father asked him, and that broke his heart, really.

There were tiny little things. There’s a bit in the play when the ghost of his father says to him, “Remember me.” And, of course, Hamlet in the speech after that goes, “Remember me? Of course, I’ll remember you.” And it’s the great paradox of grief, isn’t it? That you don’t want to forget, but you have to forget.

BOGAEV: Rips you apart. What you’re saying also gives such dimension to the very end of the play.

BEALE: Yes, yes.

BOGAEV: We all know the great speech about his preparations for death that “The readiness is all.” But as you say in your book, he ends with, “Let be.” And you say that that moment encapsulates for you everything you love about this prince in this play.

BEALE: Yes, that and the moment when he saw the play. He puts on this play, doesn’t he? “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” So, he puts on this play and he watches Claudius. His stepfather’s reaction to it as an indication whether he’s guilty or not of killing his father. Then, of course, Claudius doesn’t react well, so, Hamlet can assume that he did kill his father.

At that moment, Hamlet absolutely gave up. It was like that was the last thing he wanted. He would’ve been very happy if the proof had been that Claudius didn’t do anything wrong, but he did do something wrong, and the ghost of his father, that he can’t forget, is saying, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to kill him.” And Hamlet, my Hamlet, thought, “No, no, I can’t do that. I can’t do that.” So, that led to eventually the “Let be.” It’s great. It’s a marvelous moment, isn’t it? “Let be. Just let be.” And yeah, he dies.

BOGAEV: Well, years later, though, you gave your greatest performance as Hamlet for the infamous Philomena Cunk.

BEALE: God, I didn’t know that was going to come up—yeah, while she was eating a banana. [Laughter]

[CLIP from the 2016 BBC series, Cunk on Shakespeare. Simon Russell Beale reads Hamlet.]

CUNK: Shakespeare’s tragedy plays are the most performed of all his works, none more so than Hamlet, with its famous speech about bees.

BEALE: To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—

CUNK: What was all that about then?

BOGAEV: The wrestling you hear in the background is her taking out her phone because she’s so bored.

BEALE: Bored, yeah, it was very funny. I’d seen her stuff before and I thought it was fantastically funny, and then she said, “Okay, can you come and do Shakespeare?”

Actually, some people said, “Were you aware that she was, you know, taking the mickey?” I said, “Well, yes, of course, I was. She was sitting there eating a banana. I don’t think even the rudest interview would be doing that.”

I remember the director said, “Just treat her as you would your not entirely bright niece. I don’t mean a real niece, but as if you were talking to a young child who you know is not the brightest.” And that’s what I did. So, all the stuff I did was absolutely, genuinely, probably you know what I would’ve said in a normal interview, but of course, she would alchemize it into something ridiculous.

BOGAEV: I’m going to tell people to think that way when we send out our invitations. [Laughs]

Are there any roles still like to do?

BEALE: I’d like to do Falstaff on stage.  I’ve just been stiffing around Angelo thinking, “Hmm, an old Angelo…”

BOGAEV: Oh, Measure for Measure? 

BEALE: Yeah

BOGAEV: And how he suddenly revives his urges?

BEALE: Well, there’s nothing—an old man suddenly in lust—

BOGAEV: Yeah.

BEALE: There’s nothing more undignified than that, is there? [Laughs.]

BOGAEV: And that’s what you want to do? [Laughs.]

BEALE: That’s what I’d quite like to look at, yeah, yeah. [Laughter].

[Music fades in.]

BOGAEV: That’s wonderful. I would so look forward to that. Thank you so much for this.

BEALE: Well, thank you, Barbara.

—————————-

KARIM-COOPER: That was Sir Simon Russell Beale, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Beale’s memoir, A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories, is out now from Little, Brown. His Titus Andronicus has reached the end of its run at the RSC, but you can stream many of his past performances online.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Helen Lennard in Stratford-upon-Avon and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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Until next time, thanks for listening!