Around the time that American children are finishing off their Dr. Seuss books, British actor Simon Russell Beale was reading Julius Caesar, his first Shakespeare play, in school. He was eight years old and a boarding student at the posh St. Paul’s Cathedral School in London, where his military father had also been a student. “I started acting as a little boy,” recalls Beale, whose much-heralded Hamlet arrives in Boston this week. “We were in an all-boys’ school, so I had to take the girls’ roles. I started with Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then played Desdemona in Othello and Joan of Arc [in Henry VI, Part 1].”

Eventually Beale graduated to trouser parts in senior school before continuing on at Cambridge University. After Cambridge, he decided to try an acting school, London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He had been a music scholar at Cambridge but inquired “if I could join the drama course. They were rightfully wary, but I auditioned and they said yes.” After a job in the provinces and a show at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Beale was spotted by the Royal Shakespeare Company. He spent eight seasons in Stratford, then moved on to the Royal National Theatre, where he has stayed. He has played a highly praised Iago, Edward II, Richard III, Edgar in King Lear, and Ariel in The Tempest, in addition to scores of other leading roles. “I like my subsidized theater, don’t I?”

At age 39, Beale was quite ready to take on what many consider the grandest part of all, the moody prince of Hamlet. He opened in the role a year ago in London in the RNT production directed by John Caird. Critics hailed him as “a brilliant Hamlet” (Evening Standard) and a Hamlet who “is everything one could hope for: witty, ironic, intelligent . . . a perfect Hamlet for the age of irony” (Guardian). He went on to win the London Evening Standard Award for Best Actor and the London Critics’ Circle Award for Best Shakespearean Performance. And if some pundits remarked in print on his unlikely physique (which makes for a short, somewhat packed prince rather than the lean-limbed, high-cheek-boned one of, say, Ralph Fiennes), it must matter little to a man who stands at the top of his profession.

The RNT Hamlet opens its American tour at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre, April 11 through 22, before traveling to Minneapolis, Tucson, Phoenix, and New York. So Beale was in town last week, ensconced in a suite at the swanky XV Beacon hotel to meet the press. In person the actor is a charmer. He was dressed all in black, as if to remind a visitor of his mission as the Melancholy Dane.

Beale was suggested for the role of Hamlet 10 years ago, in a production to be directed by American Beauty director Sam Mendes. But, the actor recalls, “it never got on because of timing. When I turned 39, I said it was time to do it” — which makes him a Hamlet somewhat beyond the carousing years at Wittenberg. “I prepared step by step for the part. We had eight weeks of rehearsal. We spent an extraordinary two weeks around a table with the text, cutting it, but it was fantastically valuable. By the end of the two weeks, everyone in the cast knew the whole play backwards. All you can do, with a part of this complexity and enormousness, is take it step by step and you don’t get frightened.”

In the trimming process, the scenes with Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince, and any mention of political conflict between Denmark and Norway landed on the rehearsal-room floor, and they wound up focusing on the family. “My one idea before we began was about the scene with my mum. All great plays are so strange when you approach them, but you have to sort out in your head what’s on the page and what’s simply become a theatrical convention.” The actor doesn’t agree with the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s relationship with his mother, Gertrude. “I don’t want to have sex with my mother. I want her to stop sleeping with my uncle. I was very keen on the idea of a deep respect between the two of them [Hamlet and Gertrude]. Even though he’s saying, ‘You’re a whore and a murderer,’ Hamlet respects her. I wanted them to be a mother and son, not lovers.”

When Beale, as Hamlet, recites the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, he thinks the character is contemplating suicide rather than considering an abstract philosophical concept. “Unquestionably, he is thinking of the possibility. It’s interesting because, in our production, Ophelia is left on stage while he’s speaking, and she’s the one person in the play who goes mad and does commit suicide. Shakespeare never gives directions for her to go off. It might be Shakespeare being dramatically ironic.” Then he adds, of Hamlet, “I don’t think he’s unhappy to die at the end. Where else can he go? ‘The rest is silence.’ ”

Hamlet is at the Wilbur Theatre April 11 through 22. Tickets are $25 to $75, available at the Wilbur box office or through Ticketmaster at (617) 931-2787.

Issue Date: April 5-12, 2001