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Inner depth: Simon Russell Beale rehearses for his latest role as Andrew Undershaft in Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara

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If you happen to have seen the National's current production of Much Ado About Nothing, then you cannot fail to have been utterly charmed by Simon Russell Beale's Benedick. With the clumsy self-deprecation of an ageing bachelor who has long believed love to have passed him by, he woos Zoë Wanamaker's Beatrice with a tenderness to make a grown man cry.

Oh, I fell completely in love with Benedick,' says Russell Beale, his effeminate but eloquent vowels reminding you of a luscious, overripe plum. I flatter myself to say so, but he's right in my comfort zone. The only thing that isn't bang in the middle was winning the girl. It's odd to be playing a successful lover who is loved back.'

Russell Beale doesn't do alpha males. He's a bit too fat, too ordinary-looking, too unwieldy to play the cad or the lover who gets the girl, or the boy for that matter. Instead, he has used his very physical mediocrity to reveal the fears, vulnerabilities and inner depths of some of theatre's greatest parts; the tortured, the failed, the evil. Konstantin in The Seagull; Hamlet; Macbeth; Iago - each landmark performances. Although you can't mention this sort of thing to Russell Beale because he gets horribly embarrassed. On the wall behind him in a room at the National Theatre, for instance, is a photomontage of John Caird's production of Hamlet in which Russell Beale played the prince. 'Oh God, it's the Simon Russell Beale memorial,' he grunts, shifting awkwardly and half knocking the picture off the wall.

His new role is a complete departure - the millionaire arms dealer Andrew Undershaft in George Bernard Shaw's 1905 play Major Barbara. Undershaft returns to his estranged family after 25 years and tries to persuade his Salvation Army worker daughter of the merits of capitalism. Shaw is someone who deals in words and ideas; Russell Beale, quite simply, deals in emotion.

'I've never done any Shaw before; I've always been rather suspicious of him,' Russell Beale agrees. So he has done what he does with every character he plays: remove the received truths about them and establish a new interior landscape.
I try and get the thought behind each word absolutely clear, and often that will take you to emotional areas you don't expect,' he explains. With Undershaft, I think that, for 25 years, he had no emotional life at all. And suddenly he discovers he has this incredible daughter. And, of course, Undershaft was once poor – he's an East End boy. As, in fact, was
I – well, my family come from Romford, although I've always had this voice. But my grandfather spoke pure Romford…' Beale trails off, as he is wont to do. Sorry, I was thinking for a minute there how quickly class changes in this country, from generation to generation...'

Russell Beale had a privileged childhood, although he is also fearsomely talented. Privately educated, he became a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral School and later got a first at Cambridge. He started out playing comedy roles. 'Then someone gave me a copy of Chekhov and that was that.' Although he recently returned to comedy as King Arthur in Spamalot: 'That was glorious. And it came at a time when I needed a right kick up the bum.'

But it is the big roles - the Hamlets, the Macbeths - that he is renowned for. Someone said of his 2000 Hamlet that they had never heard the 'To be...' speech sound 'such a close call over suicide'. 'I just decided that he wasn't mad and went from there,' says Russell Beale simply. With 2005's Macbeth, Beale located the character in the fact that Macbeth was childless. 'I also thought that at the end, Macbeth should be completely still. It was partly inspired by a description I'd read by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Stalin sitting completely still in the Kremlin, and partly inspired by Jabba the Hutt.'

For that scene, Russell Beale's bulk was a distinct advantage: there was something of a lurking toad about him, sitting killing flies. Does it bother him that people go on about his appearance? 'It's been a part of my career for 20 years, so I'm used to it. But it hurt me a bit with Benedick,' he adds sorrowfully. 'Not least since I thought I'd lost a bit of weight.' He gets up, twirls, asks me what I think. And yes, he looks good: fit; trim.

Anyway, the reason he's so utterly mesmerising on stage is that he plays each part from somewhere deep inside, each time seemingly drawing on a new part of himself. 'I'm a hopeless mimic,' he says. 'When I say I love Beatrice, for instance, I'm using feelings I've had.' But it's also as though the stage is where he truly comes to life. 'Oh, yes. The theatre is where my juices go,' he agrees.

Major Barbara opens tonight, in rep until May 15, Travelex £10 season, Olivier, National Theatre, South Bank SE1, tonight 7pm, otherwise 7.30pm, mats 2pm, £10 to £30. Tel: 020 7452 3000.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Tube: Waterloo/Embankment

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