Simon Russell Beale removes his shades — worn to hide pollen-irritated eyes —
and spies the flyer I am carrying for his Old Vic season. “Good heavens,” he
says, “I look like a Caravaggio”.
It’s true. He has a 16th-century face: not a saint, or a scoundrel, but a
scholar. Talking with him is like an exhilarating tutorial. Or strolling
companionably through some medieval city, his mind swooping off at tangents.
To keep up with his references you may need a Shakespeare concordance,
Gombrich’s Story of Art, a DVD of Sacred Music — the TV
series he made for BBC Four — a history of psychoanalysis, copies of Chekhov
and Pope and the complete works of John le Carré.
This afternoon you will hear him as George Smiley when Radio 4 starts its
20-hour dramatisation of le Carré’s eight Smiley novels. When the offer came
he hesitated over “the sheer cheek of doing Smiley after Alec”.
But he never saw Guinness’s Smiley in 1979. He was in college, and the only TV
set was in the junior common room where everyone gathered to watch Not
the Nine O’Clock News and little else. He has now read all eight
novels, and they have still to record six of them: next, The Spy Who Came
in From the Cold.
Since it’s radio, it’s irrelevant that Russell Beale is like Smiley: short,
pudgy, solitary, shrewd and analytical, but one of le Carré’s characters
does remark that Smiley’s voice is beautiful and melodious. Russell Beale’s
voice is soft, gentle and low and he can throw off Smiley’s lines such as
“At Oxford I wrestled with Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants”
in a conversational way.
He has discovered that George Smiley is also an emotional, passionate man,
given to anger, and has read what le Carré writes about his conman father
and his own cloak-and-dagger spy life, “that looking-glass world, the
inverted morality, and ducking authority”.
The author and actor have never met, but when Russell Beale gave his
celebrated Hamlet at the National, a parcel arrived in his dressing-room
containing le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. How nice, he
thought, and put it on a shelf with his other books. Only months later did
he start reading it, and a fan letter from le Carré fell out. So he had to
write in grovelling gratitude. Will they now meet? “I do hope so.”
Perhaps le Carré will see him at the Old Vic. Tonight he opens as Leontes in The
Winter’s Tale, in repertory with Tom Stoppard’s new translation of The
Cherry Orchard in which he plays Lopakhin, both directed by Sam Mendes.
Mendes’ Bridge Project has just returned from its seven-month tour, which
took the ensemble (including Rebecca Hall, Sinéad Cusack, Ethan Hawke) to
New York, Singapore, Auckland, Madrid and Germany.
On the longest day of travel they flew for 24 hours, descending spectacularly
over the Andes to land in Santiago, Chile, for lunch. “I’d never been to
South America,” he says. “But now I can say, ‘I’ve never been to South
America, except for lunch’.”
The last port of call was a small town in Germany, just George Smiley’s kind
of place, Russell Beale feels. (When Smiley joined the secret service they
sent him there under cover of lecturing on German literature in prewar
days.)
“We were in Recklinghausen, just outside Bonn. It has that small-town German
predictability: the coffee shop, the apothecary — and then this huge
theatre, like Stratford. It’s such a romantic story. In 1947 a group of
actors in Hamburg ran out of coal and couldn’t heat their theatre. They
asked the miners of the Ruhr valley to give them some coal, which they did,
free. To thank them the actors came down to Recklinghausen and put on a play
— from which grew this great international theatre season.”
When anyone tries to pin down what makes him a great actor they invariably
refer to his intellect. Books are his great enthusiasm. When he first went
to Stratford-on-Avon for a year in the mid-1980s — his first Winter’s
Tale, playing Clown, the young shepherd, to Jeremy Irons’s Leontes — he
went to Dillons and bought 24 books on religious history, a subject he still
lists (with music) under “Recreations” in Who’s Who.
He started with John Julius Norwich’s books on the Normans, “lovely meaty
reads”, and hasn’t stopped. The night before we met, he’d been reading
Hilary Mantel’s Reformation novel Wolf Hall, and fell asleep
cogitating on how Mantel deals with Thomas Cromwell’s grief after his wife
dies suddenly. He fell in love with Mantel’s novel of the French Revolution, A
Place of Greater Safety. “And then I met Simon Schama doing a radio show
in New York and gushed over him embarrassingly about Citizens.To stop
me, he took me round the Met and has since become a friend.”
Russell Beale was born in Penang, Malaysia, one of five children of an army
surgeon who rose to become surgeon-general. They lived in Libya, Singapore
and Germany. Three of his siblings are doctors, one brother an opera singer;
one sister died at 4. From the age of 8 to 13, as a chorister in St Paul’s
Choir School, Simon Beale (“Russell” was added for Equity) sang in the
cathedral every day.
“There’s something odd and wonderful and glamorous about being brought up
abroad. We would do Christmas in the cathedral then I would be the only boy
going off to Heathrow to catch a plan to Singapore.” At Gonville &
Caius College, Cambridge, where he was choral scholar and read English, his
director of studies was J. H. (Jeremy) Prynne, the poet, but for his final
year he asked to be supervised by Eric Griffiths of Trinity, and got a
first.
He remains undaunted by demanding work. While in Germany “with bugger-all to
do” between performances, he drafted the 2009 Ernest Jones lecture, to be
delivered to the British Psychoanalytical Society. This came about after the
cricket-mad Mendes took a box at Lord’s and invited Russell Beale and Mike
Brearley, the MCC captain who moved on to a second career as a
psychotherapist and teacher of drama.
Brearley invited him to give a Saturday morning lecture on the psychopathology
of Macbeth, and was so impressed he proposed him for the Ernest Jones
lecture, mentioning, among other previous speakers, Bertrand Russell. “I
thought, ‘I can’t pretend to be an intellectual, I can’t talk about anything
but acting’,” Russell Beale says.
But in two weeks of writing, a theme developed. He planned to speak about how
an actor approaches a Shakespearean part, trying to wipe out all the
performances he’s seen or heard about so that he can start from scratch.
“I talked to a friend who’s studying psychoanalysis, and she muttered ‘without
memory or desire’, which comes from a psychoanalyst called [Wilfred] Bion,
who said that’s how you should approach psychoanalysis. So I’ve called it
‘Without memory or desire’.” His lecture will propose that Iago, Macbeth,
Hamlet, Leontes, all end up in a state of suspended animation, a sort of
transcendental state, without memory or desire.
“Hamlet gets to an extraordinary serenity, Macbeth a timeless misery, Iago an
absolute hell, that loveless universe that he inhabits, and of course none
of us ever knows Leontes’ experience of a wife coming back to life.” This
leads him to ponder on the supposedly joyous ending of The Winter’s Tale
— “being forgiven and starting again, mistakes acknowledged but not dwelt on
. . . . but what does that last scene mean? Do we sit there thinking of the
joy, or do we think, ‘Well, that’ll never happen?”
He recalls his Cambridge generation as “pretty astonishing” — Emma Thompson,
Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton — but then adds that because he
was in the Cambridge chamber choir and all the rehearsals were in the
afternoons he could do only one play a term. The first was as Sir Politick
Would-Be to Stephen Fry’s Volpone at the ADC. The Footlights were “too
scary” for him.
A daughter e-mailed me yesterday to ask “Was Simon Russell Beale adorable? All
my theatre friends get very hot and excited whenever his name is mentioned.”
And a dame of the theatre said to me: “If only he weren’t gay, he’d have so
many women.” He doesn’t even seem to know that he has a devoted blogger, a
nurse named Simone, who recently reported that “SRB was getting a lot of
love” in New York, where The Cherry Orchard theme went down
well with the newly cash-strapped audiences.
Why, I asked, did Lopakhin not marry Varya? He went into an agony of tortured
bachelordom. “I very early on decided that Lopakhin is in fact in love with
Ranevskaya. Or, at least, he is in love with what she represents — the past,
the never-forgotten nose-bleed when she looked after him, and it’s all tied
up together.
"It is terrible, that scene, only seven lines long, but at the point when I’m
about to propose to her, my version is that he can see the sense of marrying
her; it’s sensible, she’s the right class, Ranevskaya says that she’s a good
worker and the right person — but that very fact is what stops him. He goes
into that scene perfectly prepared to give it a whirl, then looks into her
eyes and does that thing of backing down, thinking, ‘I’m not that person any
more’.”
He hadn’t read Anthony Powell before he played the awful Widmerpool, but so
definitive was his performance that he was asked to speak at Powell’s
memorial service. He read from A Dance to the Music of Time about
“new news every day . . . of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts,
murders, massacres” and so pleased the Powellites that he was invited to be
president of the Anthony Powell Society.
It is deeply satisfying to be able to indulge his academic approach to the
“great pieces of literature” that he performs. But having discovered that
Leontes deludes himself, that he is “a rational, good king, a reasonable
man, nothing despotic, can’t call me a tyrant, and so on, so I don’t have to
rant”, he read the introduction to the Cambridge edition of the play — and
discovered that his thesis wasn’t original at all.
The Beales remain a close family. Various siblings came to Madrid and New York
to see him, and being in Germany brought back happy memories. “We had
amazing holidays with a caravan. Four children and a pregnant mother,
driving across to a beach just below Naples, then a slow crawl back through
Europe with us children all sitting in the caravan, crocheting rugs – which
was the way Mum decided to keep us amused. At the end of a three-day journey
we had each made a blanket.”
In Singapore, during the recent tour, he went to see the house they lived in.
It’s now a restaurant. By the time his father became surgeon-general, his
parents had a tiny flat in Millbank near his current flat, where, like
Smiley, he lives alone.
The Cherry Orchard is really tough,” he says. “It’s so elusive, so
emotional. But it’s like sand through the fingers, terribly difficult to get
a hook on it. Nothing happens.” I wonder if he has seen Waiting for
Godot. “Well, that’s exactly where it’s leading, isn’t it, you can just
see Chekhov opening the door for Beckett, and saying, ‘In you go’.”
— The first of the Smiley dramatisations, Call for the Dead, is
on Radio 4 today at 2.30pm. Four Smiley novels, including Call for the
Dead, have been reissued by Sceptre, at £7.99 each. To buy them for
£7.59 each call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst The
Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale, the Old Vic, London SE1,
till Aug 15 (0870 0606628; www.oldvictheatre.com)
BIOGRAPHY
Dressing up
Simon Russell Beale was born in 1961 in Penang, Malaya, where his father was a
military doctor. He became a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral aged 8, before
going to Clifton College , Bristol, on a choral scholarship. There he played
Desdemona in Othello aged 14 — his first role — and also performed in King
Lear. He studied English at Cambridge before attending the Guildhall
School of Music & Drama.
Dress rehearsal
His early roles were in Restoration comedies at the RSC. It was here that he
met Sam Mendes, who went on to cast him as Ariel in The Tempest and
as Richard III and Iago. By the time he came to play Hamlet in 2001 he had
played Konstantin in Chekhov’s The Seagull and Oswald in
Ibsen’s Ghosts.
World stage
Beale’s roles at the National have included George in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers
(2003) and Galileo in David Hare’s adaptation of Brecht’s The
Life of Galileo (2006). He last appeared there in Harold Pinter’s A
Slight Ache (2008). In Sam Mendes’s farewell productions at the Donmar
Warehouse he played Malvolio in Twelfth Night and won the Laurence
Olivier Award for Best Actor for the title role in Uncle Vanya. He is
now appearing at the Old Vic in The Cherry Orchard and The
Winter’s Tale.
SMALL TALK
On directing
I could never be a director. Sam Mendes has a good eye, an almost puritanical
and symmetrical visual sense; he’s conscious always of making pictures. I
have no visual imagination.
On Hamlet
I was originally going to do Hamlet for Sam, and it would have been very
different from the one I did for John Caird. John allowed my Hamlet to be
about love and grief. My mother had just died, and I wanted him to be a
sweet prince, struggling with the fact of death. Sam’s Hamlet would have
been harder-edged.
On academia
I wanted to do a PhD on the Victorian cult of the death of children, but Eric
Griffiths said, ‘Don’t be so stupid, you’re not clever enough’. I’d quite
like to have given it a try.
On Spain
In Madrid you get a sense of the golden age of theatre that we’ve lost. It’s
fashionable to go to the theatre as a sort of apéritif and then, because of
their absurd hours, to dinner.
On work commitments
The bore of being an actor is you’re invited to so many dinners and can never
go. I missed the Anthony Powell Society and have had to turn down the Royal
Academy dinner, with its white tie and medals. Why is it always dinner,
never morning coffee?
