Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue,” says William Shakespeare’s heroine Rosalind, breaking character to speak to the audience at the end of As You Like It, written in 1599. Neither has it been the fashion, since then, to see the actor play the critic. In fact, the whole idea of character analysis in Shakespeare studies was out of fashion until relatively recently. But Simon Russell Beale’s memoir of a career spent playing some of the great (and many of the minor) Shakespearean roles, is as much a work of criticism as of autobiography. It is a better read for that. At the age of 63, Beale can claim to be one of Britain’s most prolific and revered stage actors. The book is a patchwork of episodes from his life and sketches of the characters he has played over the years, starting with the lonely Roman, Cassius, and moving through some of the great comic and tragic heroes, Benedick, Richard III, Macbeth, Leontes and Lear. While Beale is careful to avoid making claims to be “an academic, or even a genuine amateur specialist”, he confesses that he finds it impossible not to think of the characters he plays “as less than living, breathing men and women”. And when he breaks off from telling the story of his own life to deliver his observations on a particular role, the insights feel truer for being born of emotional, rather than purely intellectual, labour.Beale is honest about the pitfalls of this approach. His interpretations are partial and deeply subjective. His chosen characters are typically loners or outsiders in some sense, looking for acceptance and, above all, redemption. And the themes he draws out from them are reflected in the telling of his own life story. It is easy, for example, to see what the appeal of joining a company of actors might have been to the son of an army doctor who had a peripatetic and often isolated boyhood. His meditation on the crippling grief of Leontes, the jealous king who is responsible for the death of a beloved child, turns upon Beale’s memories of the death of his younger sister, Lucy, who suffered from a congenital heart defect and died at the age of four.Readers may flag at the level of detail with which Beale describes his early career at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. But 30 years working in British theatre have given him an unusually acute understanding of the relationship between what he describes as the “work in the study and the work on the stage”. He interrogates the centuries-long scepticism that actors have had for scholars, and vice versa. “I have met scholars who believe that Macbeth and King Lear should never be performed, because any attempt to do those plays justice will fail,” he writes, gearing up to dismantle that argument in his account of his own performance of Lear in Sam Mendes’ production of 2014.In an interview with the FT this year about playing the part, Beale remembered a game with a fellow actor in which they habitually ranked “our top five favourites and our bottom five” of Shakespeare’s plays. “The bottom five were always the same. And the top five used to change, but Lear was always in them,” he said. It’s a revealing anecdote that hints at how consistent a presence Shakespeare’s plays have been through his career. A life’s work in fact — irrespective of the changing fashions. Cordelia Jenkins is deputy editor of FT Weekend MagazineA Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale Abacus £25, 288 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
