Simon Russell Beale

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0:29Hello and welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the actor Simon Russell Beale. Widely acclaimed as one of the greatest actors of his generation, he's played many of the leading Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and most recently Titus Andronicus at the RSC. His many awards include three Olivier's, two BAFTAs, and a Tony Award in 2022 for his leading role in the Lehman Trilogy, which had transferred from London.

1:05Simon Russell Beale was knighted by the Queen in 2019 for services to drama. Simon Russell Beale, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. Your first choice of influence that you've made for this programme is a child's map of Penang, in what is now Malaysia, which you say you had on your bedroom wall since childhood. Let's talk about the map in a moment, because you were born in 1961 in Penang. What were your parents doing there? Dad was an army doctor, and mum was a doctor, but not actually in the army, but she actually ran the practice on Penang Island for all the military people there. At the age of 23, amazing.

1:45Yeah, and you had this map on your wall when you were living there in Penang. The map was always around, and it's now on my bedroom wall. Oh, it's still on your wall? Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. And it's a kid's map and it has those sort of things like this is where rubber is collected, this is where the fishermen live, you know, little figures. And I had a very similar map of what's now Malaysia, Malaya then, a boarding school. And I used to look at it and, you know, think, oh, yes, that's my home country, bizarrely. And boarding school back in England then? Yeah, yeah. So most of the family stayed in the Far East.

2:17Yeah. And you were... Well, it was a bit more dramatic than that. They left for the Far East and left me in England. It's a sort of family story because they didn't really say a proper goodbye because it sort of wasn't done, really, it thought would upset me. So mum said goodbye, but my brothers and sisters just disappeared. And I was left with my grandparents in South Wales before I went to my first boarding school. And I was seven. You were seven when they left? Yes. Do you remember? Your face is looking, that must be very traumatic. And, of course, it is so odd now. And it was odd, and I wouldn't do it to a child of mine.

2:54But it was sort of more conventional then, I think. But is that memory bound up with a feeling of trauma and loss and being abandoned and any of those things? Or actually, was it a sense of freedom, liberation, possibly? Oh, no one's ever put it like that. I mean, I think I could trace the psychological impact of that probably quite clearly. But, you know, Mum said goodbye, and she was crying, I remember. and I was for one term to school in South Wales before I went to boarding school. So I went off to school and she, when I came back that day, she wasn't there. And I suppose inevitably I must have, I think I was just puzzled.

3:31But the whole family, yeah, got on a boat and sailed around the world to go to their new home in Singapore. And would you join them during holidays? Yes, yes. And the tug in my mind is that it was both odd, probably traumatic if I dared to admit it, but also rather exciting, which is why the map of Penang is a reminder of what it was like at school in London looking at a map of my home, which was pineapples and bananas and rubber trees and beauty. And you were one of six siblings? You've caught me out. I'm trying to count them. One, two, three, four, six, yeah. What number were you in? I was the first person to be sent to boarding school in England.

4:19And I had a little sister who died around that period. So there are five of us left. She was very young when she was four, yes. And part of the tapestry of that period is Lucy being ill. I mean, it was four years. She was ill all the time in and out of Grey Warden Street. and mum coming over to care for her on one occasion, certainly, and living in a Salvation Army hostel next to, which I think still exists, next to the hospital. What was wrong with her? She had a hole in the heart. I'm not medical, unlike the rest of my family, so they'd be more accurate, and I'm not quite sure quite what that means.

5:02And you were at school when she died? Yes. Yes. Yes, I was 11, so I would be coming to the end of my first school. Has that stayed with you at that moment? Were you too young to understand what was going on, do you think? It was all a bit, again, a bit odd, because this is the late 60s, early 70s, and I think the rule was that children were not to be exposed to that type of trauma, really. So I was at school and I was called down to the headmaster's study, And dad was there. And he said, I'm very sorry Lucy died this morning. Mum wasn't there, I remember. And then the headmaster said, well, I think you should go back to your class.

5:51And that was sort of it. And it sounds terribly brutal, but it wasn't really. It was to do with trying to protect us from that type of anxiety and pain. and you know I think probably seeing my mother distressed would have been very difficult to cope with but it is it is significant. And just getting back to this map of Penang which is still there on your bedroom wall you look at that map and does it evoke a sense of a happy childhood generally? Oh yes I think so I mean I we had very odd because I was at choir school we had very odd dates for our holidays so we spent Christmas at school and Easter at school.

6:31So I would then fly out from Heathrow on, I don't know, Boxing Day or the 27th of December. And I was the only child on the plane. It was so

6:44glamorous, I suppose is the word. It was so exciting. Grandma used to put me on the plane and then, and in those days, it was sort of six stops on the way. So you'd go to Zurich and Beirut and Pakistan and then India and whatever. And I used to get off the plane. walk round the, I don't know quite, they must have been keeping an eye on me, walk round the terminal in these extraordinary exotic places. And trust you to get back on the next place. Well, I presume there was somebody who would make sure I did, but I never saw them. It must have instilled a sense of independence, though. Yes. And confidence.

7:18I think that's absolutely true. I think there was independence, there was confidence, and also status. I was the boy who lived in Singapore.

7:39Your next choice for this cultural life, Simon Russell Beale, is the opening chorus of Bach's St Matthew Passion. Before you tell us how and when you heard this piece of music, just describe Bach's St Matthew Passion to us and why it's so special to you.

7:57Bach never writes a bad note, that's the first thing to say. I mean, there's nothing he wrote that isn't marvellous. And the Matthew Passion is the story of Christ's last days, and it's told through music, and it takes about three hours, three and a half hours, and every year at St Paul's Cathedral we would perform it. And the opening is that sense of anticipation of a story being told.

8:35CHOIR SINGS

8:47I don't think there's a better representation of being sat down to be told a story by a master. And even at eight, I knew there was something profoundly special about that three hours.

9:07The Matthew Passion was about we're going to dig deep for three hours and at the end of it you'll be tired and fulfilled in some sort of way. And that's what that piece always... It's like Pavlovian reaction whenever I hear those first notes. It's like, here we go, three hours of wonder ahead of us.

9:30My family was entirely... Dab was an amateur classical musician and a very active one. and so we were brought up with a lot of music, not a lot of literature, not a lot of art, but music all the time. And so I must have heard it before, but what I remember is first hearing it at school in order to sing it. It's magical to perform.

10:02So you studied music, you're a chorister a very prestigious music school and then went on to Guildhall to study music. Oh, that's a big gap. You're leaping. Well, you'd studied English at Cambridge, hadn't you? No, I went to university and then, yes, I went to the Guildhall. But the route was music, even from a young age. The route was music, yes. I think I sung a religious service every day of my working life from about seven, you know, and obviously there was lots of concert work and whatever. I wasn't a natural. I was never given a solo at St Paul's, ever. and then I went on as a music scholar to school and then as a choral scholar to university.

10:39So my job at both those places was a musician principally. But you imagine that would be your job in life, that would be a professional life after leaving university? Yeah, which is why I went to Guildhall as a postgraduate opera singer. And you trained in opera then? Well, for a very, very short time, I mean literally weeks. I had a wonderful teacher called Rudolf Pean at the Guildhall and he said, look, you've got to start from scratch again. and build up a new technique as a soloist. And I think I probably was too lazy to do that. And also there was this other thing that had crept in, which was acting on stage.

11:16So at what point did you make that shift? Because at Guildhall, they're training musicians and actors and the art of stagecraft in very different ways, I presume, in different parts of the building. Did you have to kind of cross the floor? Yes, exactly that. I was lucky enough to be at a college that did both. So I had a word with the powers that be and said, look, I'm in the wrong place. Had you done any acting up to that point? I did a bit at university and I had a brilliant English teacher at school who introduced me to the big man, Shakespeare. And I had sort of fallen in love with all that.

11:49And then I read English at university. So it was sort of, it was beginning to creep up on me that this was probably where my interest really lay. I mean, I didn't miss singing. When I gave up singing, I didn't miss it, which is very... I surprised myself. So you don't sing anymore? No. Even at home? No. As an actor, you are so renowned for your speaking voice, and particularly in the delivery of verse. Has that musical training helped, do you think, with the acting, and particularly the delivery? Well, I'm a little bit puritanical about the verse in terms of its structure and rhythm, and not the sound of it.

12:23I don't have a beautiful voice in the sense that... I don't know what that means, actually. But I mean, I know people who are known to have beautiful voices and I'm not sure I fall into that category. But I am very, very concerned that the structure of verse in verse drama is acknowledged. So I've been working on a very early Shakespeare, which is very regular in its rhythm. Titus Andronica. Titus Andronica's. And I've done late Shakespeare's like Tempest and whatever, which are much more fluid. but this one is like Marlowe in the sense that it's ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, quite a lot of the time.

12:58But I think it has its power because of that, and you have to observe that. If that's a musical response, I don't know. It might be. I think also that you have a, going back to the Bach, that if you have the luck to play a part like Hamlet or King Lear or what was a very dominant part, that you have to be aware of the rise and fall of the macro structure of a piece, you know. here we are two and a half hours in we can't waste time we need to push on for the last hour so that's like a sort of schizo movement in a symphony i'm not interested in making a beautiful sound though and a great danger is if you start thinking oh that's a beautiful line i'll deliver it beautifully you know you say you don't sing anymore at home you don't sing professionally do you play i play the piano it's my only hobby and it's of such such importance in my life as a therapeutic thing, but also I love the sort of trying to...

13:52Fun enough, I'm doing Bach at the moment and trying to learn it off by heart, which I find very difficult with music. Words are easier. What do you play? I'm doing the Preludes and Fuse, the 48.

14:07It is such a therapeutic tool. I've always been embarrassed I don't have a hobby. When I first worked with the brochures for coming at Stratford, I wanted to see it have a hobby. They sort of made furniture and tapestries. and all sorts of things. And I thought, no, OK, no, just relax. You've got the piano.

14:33Your next choice, Simon Russell Beale, is a soliloquy from Macbeth, the one in which he considers the assassination of Duncan and its probable consequences. And you say this is the first Shakespearean speech that you learned for your own enjoyment. Yes. So when was that then? Were we going back to school again? I was 14, 15, and we were studying at Bethany. I was mesmerised by this play. I thought it was absolutely sensational. And this particular speech is such a strange, hallucinogenic speech. And you remember it off by heart, I presume. Well, can I do it now? If it were done when tis done, then to all well it were done quickly.

15:13if the assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with his Circe success. I've forgotten it now. Anyway, it goes on, but it ends with this vision of a naked newborn babe. And pity, like a naked newborn babe, striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air, shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, the tears shall drown the wind. I have no smile.

16:11has led me through by the hand Shakespeare. Was it this speech in particular that was your kind of gateway? Macbeth was the whole thing. And then I did Lear when I was 17 at school. And that stuck in my head. And funnily enough, when I came to relearn it when I was in my 50s, when I was at the National Theatre, a lot of it was still there in the back of my brain, weirdly. And I think the same would be true of Macbeth. But it was a great teacher who I just thought, this is it. And as I say, my family were not literary in that sense. So I'd not been introduced to it at home. Particularly, they didn't read.

16:53Particularly, it was music. So it was a sort of new world to me, too. And you played Macbeth, didn't you, at the Almeida in 2005? Yeah, not one. I got it slightly wrong, I think. You got it wrong? Yeah. In what way? Well, I mean, I'd like to do it again. I mean, I think he can be played as an older man. And I'd like to do him as a man who's right at the end of his military career. I have this idea of him winding down to a sort of stasis. The famous speech, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it's a picture of a man who cannot move. And I had this idea, and I wonder whether I did it justice. Because I think it is a good idea.

17:35but the trouble about stasis on stage is quite difficult to do interestingly and I think I'd like another go. How would you do it differently? Oh I don't know a director I'm working with at the moment was recently done of course with the witches through headphones it's that sort of idea that I would love to have thought of when I did it in other words it's an internal journey I think it's for all its reputation for blood and it's a very very internalized part it's not just swords and soldiery it's a man who just collapses in on himself as does his wife of course famously and separate from him but in other words the internalization of guilt and pain and failure are quite difficult to do imaginatively i had him i had this image of him sitting on a chair for the whole of the second half of the play, sort of from when he becomes king, and not moving.

18:39And that's what you delivered, and that didn't... It didn't please me, no. It pleased the audience? What about the audience? I mean, it's the audience that matters, isn't it? Yeah, of course. I don't know. It didn't please some of the critics, but I don't know. People do come up to me and say they enjoyed it, but... At what point in the run did you think, actually, I've got this wrong, this isn't quite working as I thought it might. Quite early on, I think I'm not getting this right. And does that prompt you to think, actually, we need to kind of run back into the rehearsal room and think again about what I'm doing here?

19:14Or are things locked in? Yeah, if only. I mean, I think things are locked in. Also, I don't know how you would do that. I take responsibility for it. I mean, I think Emma Fielding, who played Lady Macbeth, I think would probably disagree. But I think, again, it was a private disappointment. I think, in my own ability. I also went very slow at some points.

19:39But there you go. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I do remember a critic. I don't actually read the critics anymore. I used to. But I remember a critic saying, honestly, it was interminable. And, you know, this one speech where the temptation to go very slowly is probably almost irresistible. You're taking a lot of responsibility for this, though, Simon. Surely at some point the director comes in and says, we need to speed this up. Well, perhaps he was pleased. I don't know. Who was the director? John Caird. He did the Hamlet I did, which was a different experience altogether because I... You're faster.

20:13I was faster. But I also felt happy with Hamlet because I thought, this is my Hamlet, you know, and I'm... It is interesting about those sort of parts because you create your own version of it, don't you? And they're so well-known. and they're so famous and so many people have done them that you're not aiming for the perfect, complete version of them. And I think with Hamlet it was like a sort of... I thought, yeah, this is my version. I'm confident in my version. And I'm confident in where I look, which is not conventionally romantic leading man look. I'm convinced by my own argument about him being a sweet prince, about it being an exploration of grief.

20:55I felt secure. I think probably if I did Macbeth again, I would use the same arguments, but find a different way to try and express them. You spent so much time at the Royal Shakespeare Company, at the National Theatre, associated with so many big, great, serious roles. But when you started your career, you were mostly playing comic roles, weren't you? Yes. Did you have a natural aptitude for comedy, do you think? If the script was funny, I think I could be funny. I don't think I've got a particular skill in physical comedy. I have had moments in my career when I've had to do a sort of a comic fall from a chair, for instance, and I think, I mean, I've done it, but it's not my strong suit.

21:34You know, something like I did a play called London Assurance, which was rewritten brilliantly by Richard Bean. You know, there's some crackers lines in that. And you think if you go have those sort of lines given to you, then I think I can get a response from that. It's an undeniable fact that plain people always praise the beauties of the mind. Excuse the insinuation. I had thought the First Lady Courtley had surfeited you with beauty. Oh, no, no, no, no. No, she lived 14 months with me. And then eloped with my best friend. And I miss him.

22:10And then there's physical comedy as well. I remember seeing you in Much Ado About Nothing. You fell into a pool of water. I mean, it was a genuine belly laugh. There were people who were crying with laughter. Yeah, it was. I take absolutely no responsibility for that at all. It was brilliant. Sometimes at the very beginning of rehearsals, designers used to show you a set model, you know, sort of 3D model. It's now more computerised. And there was this pool in the middle of the set. And you could see both me and, say, Wanamaker, who was playing, was thinking, well, somebody's going to fall into that.

22:45But the presumption is the pool is only a couple of inches deep. Yeah. Oh, no, it wasn't. The fact is you were up to your neck, actually. Oh, no, this was feet deep and heated. So it was marvellous. You could stay down there for quite a long time. But you're right, the laugh on that was one of the most satisfying because also the audience is sitting there thinking, at some point, surely, this man is going to end up in the pool. But you're right, I started off as a comic actor, really. Did you feel like you were being typecast in the early days with the comic roles, the character roles, those supporting roles?