A table for... Simon Russell Beale

lllustration by Lyndon Hayes

On my way to meet the actor Simon Russell Beale for lunch at Fischer’s in Marylebone, I try my best to push all thoughts of pies from my mind. There will be schnitzel, I tell myself, picturing an expanse of golden breadcrumbs; there will be goulash and tafelspitz and apple strudel with lashings of cream. But it’s no good. He’s waiting for me in the restaurant – I should say that on this bright spring morning, its impersonation of a Viennese cafe circa 1910 is as impeccable as ever – and no sooner have I parked myself on the banquette beside him than the P-word inevitably flies from my mouth. “We really mustn’t order pies!” I say, clutching a linen napkin as if I’m about to have an attack of the vapours.

Russell Beale laughs. He knows what’s brought this on. The pie that’s on my mind appears in Shakespeare’s early gore-fest, Titus Andronicus, the title role of which he is shortly to play at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford; its filling comprises the heads of two men called Chiron and Demetrius, and once it’s baked – Titus plays the cook, grinding their bones like pepper – it is fed to their unwitting mother, Tamora (luckily, Titus kills her too, soon after this). “No, it’s not really a lunchtime play, is it?” he says, quietly buttering a slice of rye bread. But still, he can’t resist telling me that among the company discussions about the appearance of the pie are now underway. Egged on by Russell Beale, the production’s director, Max Webster, is considering going for broke. Picture, if you dare, the kind of vast, steaming affair favoured by Desperate Dan in the Dandy. I don’t think he’s joking.

When we meet, the cast is only about half way through rehearsals, and nothing is yet fully clear. The play, to put it mildly, is somewhat problematic in a modern context (Titus kills his daughter, Lavinia, in shame at her rape). “Part of our job is to make it feasible,” he says. “So we’re having a debate. The actor who’s playing Lavinia wants her to die with some sense, I suppose, of agency.” His view is that nothing is sacred; he’s no puritan when it comes to the text, particularly this one, the playwright’s first and least esteemed tragedy: “What about if we just rewrite it? We can use his words, but in a different order…” So far, they’ve worked only on its physical side. The text is next, and then they’ll move on to what he calls theatre stuff. “There’ll be a day of blood, and what to do with it,” he says, not without relish. “Where does it go? Do I have a shower? Will the stage be mopped with a squeegee? That kind of thing.” He shudders. He finds mopping horribly suggestive, far more upsetting than the violence that precedes it.

Pluckily, we reach for our menus. Actors keep strange hours; they like smooth, efficient, rather glamorous places like Fischer’s that stay open late, and the small flat Russell Beale rents also just happens to be around the corner (his real home, now, is in Wiltshire, close to where he grew up). But for him, there’s another factor, too: “I filmed one of the BBC series I did about classical music in Vienna, and I rather came to like Austrian food, so I will be having a starter, if that’s alright.” He orders chopped liver, which comes with sweet cucumber pickle and matzos, followed by wiener schnitzel with Parisienne sauce and a side dish of root vegetables. I order, less exotically, a starter of beetroot and goat’s cheese salad, and a main course of spatchcock chicken with fries. When the beetroot arrives, I will attempt to remain unruffled by the colour of the stain it will leave on my plate.

Russell Beale was born in 1961 in Penang, in what was then Malaya, where his parents worked as doctors (his father served in the army medical forces). At Cambridge he read English, and after getting a first he decided to embark on a PhD about the cult of the death of the child in Victorian literature – a decision that, as his mother noted, was possibly connected to the fact that in his own childhood his sister died (he was one of six siblings). But he didn’t stick with it: “Oh my God, so morbid!” Instead, he went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to train as a singer – he’d been a choral scholar at university – only to end up asking the head of drama if he might swap subjects. Shakespeare had been his great love at school, and in his heart of hearts he knew he really wanted to be an actor.

We ponder his career as we eat our starters, Russell Beale happily demolishing the pink-grey cliff of chopped liver on his plate (my appetite is returning… slowly). “It was all very unplanned,” he tells me. “There just weren’t that many options, as I remember. You did theatre, and then, if you were lucky enough, you might get a film.” Such a path meant that he used to know everyone in the acting world, or just about – a situation that’s in stark contrast to the present day. Arriving for a read through of House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel in which he appears, he found that he had met only two out of 40 actors before: “They’ve come up through a different route. They must all look at me as the old Shakespeare person.”

And it’s true, his metier is the stage, where he has played almost every great Shakespearian role (Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet), as well as everything else besides. To my eyes, he’s ever brilliant, whether in The Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre or the comic thriller Deathtrap in the West End; I’ll buy a ticket for him alone. Was Titus Andronicus on his list? Not exactly. “I don’t find it very easy playing an alpha male, and at the beginning he is unquestionably an alpha male. Luckily, during the rehearsal, I’ve found a way … he’s not consistent, he loses his reason. Awful things happen to him: grief upon grief upon grief. Shakespeare wrote this one in the early 1590s, 10 years before Lear. You can see him sort of beginning to find his voice. The play is not elastic as later ones are, but it is interesting psychologically, and there are moments of real beauty.” The Royal Shakespeare Company last did Titus in 2017, when Blanche McIntyre directed – we agree on this – the very marvellous David Troughton in the title role. “His photograph is outside my room.”

Our main courses arrive. His schnitzel is just as I pictured it en route: it covers his plate, like the surface of a strange planet. My chicken, oozing and herby, looks boring beside it. The good part is that we’re both (I would say) quite greedy; the bad part is that Russell Beale is on the clock, about to run for a train west to Wiltshire for a night away from it all. “Do you have children?” he asks. I shake my head. “Yes, well, I can only just look after myself,” he goes on. It was somewhat to his surprise, then, that he was perfectly fine, actually rather happy, during the pandemic, even if it did close down The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway: “I used to enjoy joining the queues outside the supermarket, with 20 yards between each person.” In the evening, he and one of his doctor brothers would sit, safely socially distanced, in the churchyard near his house, and share a beer. As someone who works all the time, and who worries when he has nothing lined up, he was amazed by his capacity to do relatively little.

What will he do after Titus? “You know, I’m 64. But I’ve also worked mostly in subsidised theatre. I need to earn money for my old age. So I will be looking round for something afterwards.” He talks of his tiredness, but I don’t quite buy it. Actors, like journalists, love to work – and he seems to me as perky as ever. He gets up to go, throwing a beautiful silk scarf around his neck. “Isn’t it lovely?” he says. “I was doing a Terence Davies film: The Deep Blue Sea. I was filming in a shop that sells legal gear, and these scarves were out on a table. At the end of the day, the producer gave me one.”

He gives it a brief stroke, and then he’s off: taxi for Paddington.

Titus Andronicus runs in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 7 June