A PIECE OF WORK Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories

Simon Russell Beale in conversation with Jo Willett

One of the nation’s finest and most beloved actors, Simon Russell Beale relates his life through a career playing Shakespeare. Ever since his appearance at school as a glamorous Desdemona, complete with false eyelashes, he has been captivated by the Bard.

In A Piece of Work, Beale tries to get under the skin of the playwright and find out what interested him. Was Shakespeare an instinctive ‘conservative’ or, rather, gently subversive? Funny and touching about his own family and early life, Beale writes about the parallels with some Shakespeare characters as well as sharing his thoughts about the creative people he counts as friends.