Reprisal Role of Hamlet
by Lydia Spencer-Elliott | The Times | July 5, 2024
Damian Lewis is returning for a star-studded night at the theatre where he played the Prince of Denmark. He talks about Shakespeare and his first big break. The actor was cast as the titular part in Tim Pigott-Smith’s production of Hamlet when he was 24 – a role he will be reprising at the same venue this summer for Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year — Live! based on Allie Esiri’s anthology, which is scheduled for Monday July 8, 2024 at 7:45 p.m. in the main auditorium. Tickets start at £25. More information here.
Thirty years ago and newly out of drama school, Damian played Hamlet at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park in central London. At 53 he is playing him again — if only for the duration of its most famous soliloquy — at the same venue in a one-night-only celebration of Shakespeare. Audiences at Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year — Live! will also be treated to Danny Sapani recreating his recent acclaimed King Lear, Luke Thompson of Bridgerton reprising his part as Berowne in the RSC’s “pitch perfect” Love’s Labour’s Lost and Samuel West and Samantha Spiro playing from Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy of which they are both veterans.
Lewis, who became an international star as a co-lead of what he now calls the “aggressively popular” US thriller series Homeland, has claimed he was chosen as Hamlet because he was the only auditionee that the director, Tim Pigott-Smith, could hear from the back of the auditorium. He remembers learning one lesson in particular from his early break: Pigott-Smith advised him never to read his reviews.
“He said, ‘Know yourself where the strengths in your performance lie and take responsibility for it. Know where it works better than in other places, and back yourself. You don’t need someone to tell you whether it’s good or not. You’ll roll over and gladly have your tummy tickled by the good reviews, but if you’re going to listen to those you will also have to listen to the bad ones, and sometimes they’re pretty nasty.’ So since I was 24 years old I have not read reviews, except collectively towards the end of the run. Theatre is too raw. You’re too vulnerable.”
Some of the reviews — I have checked — were indeed tummy-ticklers, and some were nasty. Paul Taylor wrote in The Independent: “To Hamlet’s antic disposition, Lewis brings a splendidly intimidating levity which can shade into the potent expression of spiritual disgust.” Ian Shuttleworth in the London Evening Standard, however, thought him “distractingly histrionic” and wrote: “I’m sorry, but there’s no place in the prince’s antic disposition for impersonations of a chimp.”
So will the ensuing three decades have led Lewis to rethink his “to be or not to be” — theatre’s ultimate penalty shoot-out? Hamlet is, after all, partly a play about grief, and three years ago Lewis lost his wife, the actress Helen McCrory, to breast cancer. Will grief inform his performance?
“I think, if it does, it will happen innately, subliminally,” he allows. “To me it is a speech about a man contemplating suicide. It is profound. It has some of the most beautiful writing in English language in it. He’s a philosopher prince, a man stifled by inaction because of his ability to think so deeply about everything.”
Soon after his Hamlet, Lewis was picked by the director Jonathan Kent to play Laertes on Broadway in another Hamlet, starring Ralph Fiennes in the title role (a demotion Lewis originally refused, then found “confusing”, but never regretted). Two years later he was Posthumus in Cymbeline for the RSC, bringing “a haunting feeling of irreparable injury” to the part, according to the New York Times review of its US transfer. This month at Regent’s Park he will perform Posthumus’s “powerful, vitriolic, ugly speech” against women, although he claims the choice was not his. Later in the evening he will be Henry V wooing his child bride, Katherine, played by the very male, 54-year-old Paul Chahidi.
“I will do whatever Allie asks me to do,” Lewis says. “I really adore Allie and poetry, and reading poetry out loud to people at the Open Air Theatre. There’s nothing more to it than that. I’ll put on a dress if that’s what she wants me to do.”
Allie is Allie Esiri, a former member of the English Shakespeare Company and retired TV actor who has revived the art of anthology with her bestselling books, including A Poem for Every Day of the Year, poetry apps and evenings of live performances. She mounted five poetry shows with McCrory, whom she met through actor friends, and Lewis read on her apps and an audiobook.
The Regent’s Park show is a live version of her Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, published in 2019 under a children’s imprint, although anyone will enjoy her selections and the succinct, informed introductions she gives them. Esiri insists she has faced no snobbery about her pick-and-mix approach. Yes, she notes, an early Shakespeare anthologist, William Dodd, was executed, but among his distinguished successors are the Cambridge scholar George Rylands (whose compilation was recorded by John Gielgud) and Ted Hughes.
“‘To be or not to be’ doesn’t drive the action on in Hamlet,” she explains. “It doesn’t only make sense if you know what’s happened before what happens after. Like many of the soliloquies it stands alone as a work of art in itself. I think an anthology can be a bedside companion or a book of speeches for a drama student. People use it in different ways, but it is also a way in for people, and maybe a way into a play they didn’t know.”
But can a mere extract move people to tears? “I think it can. I think the speech by Constance from King John is really, really sad. She thinks she’s lost her son. It’s really powerful. Olivia Williams is doing it for us. It was written the year after Hamnet, Shakespeare’s poor son, died when he was 11. And I think with the success of that book [Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet] it’ll chime even more with the audience.”
Some actors take part in her shows partly to revisit and reinterpret old roles. “Older actors say in interviews, and it is so true, ‘We just know more. We’ve got more experience. We’re better. Don’t not cast us any more!’ Particularly with Hamlet, you do bring yourself to the role as an actor.”
Equally, however, since Shakespeare could enter any human head, some speeches no one will want to own. She says Lewis asked to play Posthumus for her show, but the misogyny of that speech is really “a hell of a warning about where jealousy can lead.”
So although there will be a festival feel to the evening, with the actors having met and rehearsed only that afternoon, and some will be off-script and others not, the show contains much more than Shakespeare’s greatest soppiest hits. Cymbeline’s misogyny is problematical. Because of its antisemitism, so is The Merchant of Venice, from which Tracy-Ann Oberman (Auntie Val from Friday Night Dinner) will play Shylock. Tricky in other ways is The Taming of the Shrew, in which Sapani will play Petruchio and Samantha Spiro — who played the headmaster’s wife Maureen Groff in Sex Education — the “shrew” Katherine.
Spiro also played her 12 years ago at Shakespeare’s Globe in a much-praised performance. Her interpretation of Kate’s eventual submission to Petruchio is that the pair really do fall for each other and that Kate, finally overwhelmed by love, willingly makes a show of conforming to what society demands of a wife.
“That actually feels quite good when it’s a gift to somebody else, doesn’t it?” she says. “She’s like a super-intelligent child who hasn’t been given any boundaries, and for the first time, in that moment, I think she knows what it feels like to say to somebody, ‘OK, I can do that for you.’”
Katherine, she believes, has similarities to Beatrice, whom she played in the Open Air Theatre production of Much Ado in 2009. Like the “shrew”, Beatrice is coruscatingly intelligent and articulate, but in her case, Spiro argues, her antagonism comes from “a very deep hurt” that a putative past romance with Benedick did not work out. It is a play in which the lovers are not meant to be young, so she is happy that being in her fifties precludes her from playing Beatrice again. “When we got into the scripts I thought, ‘Gosh, that is a part I would love to revisit.’ We are doing a couple of scenes from it, but I would love to have another crack at it.”
Not only did Spiro star in Much Ado and take the titular role in the musical Hello, Dolly! in Regent’s Park in the same season, the Open Air Theatre also provided her first acting job: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (regularly mounted by the theatre for more than 90 years).
“I played Peaseblossom and I was third witch in Macbeth. And then we did The Boys from Syracuse, directed by Judi Dench, which is based on The Comedy of Errors. It is hardly ever done, but it was fantastic. So we did all three in a season, like repertory theatre. I just couldn’t believe my luck. I remember thinking, ‘Why would you want to work anywhere else, ever? Because this is just heaven.’ And I still feel that every time I go along.”
Even the pragmatic and unsentimental Lewis would agree. “I’ll certainly feel nostalgic for the time that I played Hamlet in 1994,” he says. “It will be wonderful to be back on that stage.”
Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year — Live! is at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London NW1, on July 8.
Read the rest of the original article at The Times