Simon Russell Beale is a magnetic and versatile actor, most at home on stage. A flamboyant comic performer with a nimble sense of mischief, he can also be wistful and achingly vulnerable, especially in Chekhov. Sometimes, as when playing Stalin in John Hodge’s Collaborators, he veers from affability to ravenous despotism. Expert at conveying fastidious scholarly earnestness, questing introspection and suburban fatigue, he is able to switch between huggable soulfulness and prickly hauteur. 

In the oddly titled A Piece of Work (yes, it’s a nod to Hamlet, but isn’t it also slang for a person who’s difficult?), Russell Beale tells the story of his career. While there’s plenty for fans of stage gossip and sepia-tinted reminiscence, he concentrates on his own interpretations of Shakespearean parts. He has been a bullish Iago, a pensive Macbeth and a sweetly ironic, bookish Hamlet, though when the critic Harold Bloom saw him in the last of these roles, he encouraged him to ‘move on’ to Falstaff, whom he thought ‘the true and perfect image of life’. 

His first stab at Shakespeare came at prep school, where the headmaster made him read Mark Antony’s ‘dogs of war’ speech. Soon afterwards he wore an ivory silk dress as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A few years later, playing Desdemona, he was advised to tuck his thumbs