Theater
Being Shakespeare
A new play by Jonathan Bate
Directed by Tom Cairns
An aging Lear, disintegrating with his kingdom. A cryptic Ophelia, driven mad by madness. Hamlet, hell-bent on revenge. All of them came from the brain of Shakespeare, but what do we know about the Bard himself? In a tour-de-force performance, veteran actor Simon Callow (the original Roman Mozart in Amadeus on stage, the film Shakespeare in Love) assumes the daunting challenge of illuminating the man behind the roles in this utterly compelling one-man play by preeminent Shakespeare biographer Jonathan Bate, directed and designed by Tom Cairns. Channeling Macbeth and Henry V here, musing over Shakespeare's childhood there, Callow leaps from anecdote to soliloquy, using the famous Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It as his guide to consider how a glovemaker's son could have gone on to write the world.
Lighting design by Bruno Poet
Music and sound design by Ben and Max Ringham
Co-produced by Ambassador Theatre Group, Act Productions Limited,
and Robert Bartner and Norman Tulchin
Veteran actor Simon Callow discusses his role in preeminent Shakespeare biographer Jonathan Bate's one-man play Being Shakespeare with Princeton professor and poet Jeff Dolven.
Jonathan Bate, preeminent Shakespeare biographer, editor of the Royal Shakespeare Company's William Shakespeare Complete Works, and Oxford professor, talks about adapting the Bard's life as a one-man play.