British Star Simon Callow on Dustin Hoffman, Joseph Fiennes and Being Shakespeare

Simon Callow has long been a defining presence on stage and off in the British theater, appearing across a range of parts from Mozart in the original production of Amadeus to Sir Toby Belch in the National’s most recent Twelfth Night. As director, he guided Pauline Collins to the performance in Shirley Valentine for which she went on to win a Tony, and he has appeared on screen to vivid effect in such films as Shakespeare in Love, A Room With A View and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Now 62, Callow heads back to New York and then Chicago in April with his latest solo play, Being Shakespeare, which he is currently performing for a second run at the Trafalgar Studios in London’s West End.

Being Shakespeare isn’t your first solo play; you’ve done two separate ones drawing from the life and work of Charles Dickens. Doesn’t it get lonely up there?
No, not at all. I’m the only child of a single parent, so I love solitude. I’m entirely comfortable after a show having a meal with a book or the newspaper and a half-bottle of good red wine. In many ways, life on the road is very nice.

People have asked about the title, Being Shakespeare: do you actually come out dressed in Elizabethan garb?
[Laughs.] Not at all. That was the original title, or subtitle, of Jonathan Bate’s book that inspired our play so it’s about Shakespeare as embodying the soul of the age and about being as a form of acting and all of that. Our question actually is, What was it like being Shakespeare? Not that it’s Simon Callow being Shakespeare but on a more metaphysical level, what was it like to have all that language and inspiration passing through you. What was the nature of Shakespeare’s being?

Last year’s disputatious film Anonymous notwithstanding, you seem to believe in Shakespeare the man.
I certainly do. Our play was originally called I>Shakespeare: The Man from Stratford as a riposte to the Oxfordians, Baconians and all those other “original thinkers” who like to call Shakespeare “the man from Stratford” as proof in itself that he didn’t write the plays [because he wasn't from London]. I mean can you take geographical snobbery to a greater length? And anyway, if Roland Emmerich [the director of Anonymous] really wanted us to think that the Earl of Oxford was the author of Shakespeare’s plays, why then does he make [the Earl] not just Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son but also the father of her child? You’re in the land of silliness.

It must be fun in this show to dart among Shakespeare characters that you wouldn’t get to play in an actual production.
Absolutely! Juliet, for example, is almost my favorite character in the piece, and Mamillius [the young son in The Winter’s Tale]. The actual fact is I’ve played very few Shakespeare parts in my career—maybe a half-dozen or so on stage and then Richard III on radio, which was interesting: how do you communicate a hump that the audience can’t see? But I have spent an awful lot of time with Shakespeare’s sonnets, so I do like to think that I have steeped myself in his imagination.

When you perform Being Shakespeare, do you ever feel as if you’re being traitorous to Dickens, given that he was the occasion of your Broadway acting debut with The Mystery of Charles Dickens in 2002?
Such is my absolute love and admiration for Shakespeare that I’m sure he would approve of my little bit of adultery on the side. And, of course, they are so entirely different: Dickens’ conception of character is basically static whereas Shakespeare’s is entirely fluid. Whenever I have performed The Mystery of Charles Dickens or my version of A Christmas Carol, I find it exhilarating but exhausting, whereas Being Shakespeare isn’t at all tiring. It flows through me with an extreme naturalness.

You’re still known, of course, from various vivid supporting roles across many films.
I hope so! In Shakespeare in Love, I played Sir Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, who has the best line in the whole film: “That woman is a woman!” Tilney is the one who unmasks Gwyneth [Paltrow’s] character. What was great about that film, particularly from my perspective now doing this play, is that it gave Shakespeare a face, and I think it’s terribly important for young people particularly to be able to think of William Shakespeare as someone who lived and breathed. That said, I’m not entirely convinced that the real Shakespeare was nearly as handsome as Joseph Fiennes!

Did you ever consider moving to Hollywood?
Never ever! Apart from anything else, just temperamentally a life defined by sitting by a swimming pool is not one that appeals to me. The movement of my career has absolutely not been one of sitting around but of making things happen, and that’s very hard to do in L.A. That’s the great thing with these one-man shows and also the writing that I do, which is that I can initiate them; I don’t have to sit around waiting for anybody. I find it disgraceful to come to the end of a day and not have anything to show for it.

You starred as Mozart opposite the late Paul Scofield in the now-legendary National Theatre premiere of Amadeus. Was it frustrating to watch your part go to Tim Curry when the play was remounted for Broadway?
Well, it was always made clear to me that Scofield never wanted to appear on Broadway again and wouldn’t go and that therefore it was much easier for me to carry on with the play in London and let Ian [McKellen] and Tim do it on Broadway. There was a breathtaking moment later on when [playwright] Peter Shaffer came up to me on the steps of the film of Amadeus and said that his play was closing on Broadway and they wanted to end on a big flourish. Dustin Hoffman had said he would do it, but only if he could alternate as Mozart and Salieri, and would I like to be the other alternate. Then Dustin didn’t want to do it, and it never happened.

What’s next for you on the Shakespeare front?
I’ve had the ambition as all actors probably do of playing the great roles one after the other and that hasn’t really happened. There are a good handful of Shakespeare parts that I’m desperate to play, and it’s just a question of finding where and with whom and when.