You have to admire Patrick Stewart for his diversity. It really is quite staggering. From playing the iconic Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation to his roles as the equally legendary Professor X in the X-Men film franchise to lending his voice to American Dad!, Stewart has never been frightened to explore his creativity.
Amongst all that has been his work on the stage, perhaps one of the purest arenas in which an actor can exist, work and be truly immersed in a character and story. At this stage in his career, at the age of 71, he has sort of returned to his roots, playing pivotal roles in many of Shakespeare’s plays. This has included taking on the title role in Macbeth, playing Claudius in Hamlet, Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra and Prospero in The Tempest.
If you find yourself on a cottage break down south, you can catch the great man playing William Shakespeare in the hit play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death, which is on show at the Young Vic. And what a great time to watch a play about the bard, given that this year sees the World Shakespeare Festival celebrate the life and times of the greatest playwright the world has ever known.
But note, Bingo, which was written by Edward Bond, isn’t easy watching: it portrays Shakespeare as a corrupt individual, venal, self-motivated and irascible. This Shakespeare cuts a lonely figure, tragic like some of his characters, yet unlike any of the ones who triumph.
“Once or twice in Chichester I heard people after the show saying, oh, this isn’t the Shakespeare I know,” Stewart told the Telegraph.
“But that’s why I love this play so much. It makes you squirm at times. We have a living contradiction, a tension, in a supreme artist, and how much of that tension was responsible for the plays and poems that we love so well?”
The answer of cause is there isn’t one. It’s left to speculation, to critics, to audience members to decide. But what this play does is not so much tarnish Shakespeare’s name, but give it a new dimension. It argues for us to take another look at the man behind the work and get to the central question: what inspired him to write?
Posted by Matt Smith, cottages4you
