Photo Flash: Simon Callow Returns to BEING SHAKESPEARE

Simon Callow has returned to London's Trafalgar Studios 1 to reprise his highly acclaimed show BEING SHAKESPEARE for a strictly limited season from 7 to 31 March, before heading across the seas to appear at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music in New York and then at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at the Broadway Playhouse. 

In BEING SHAKESPEARE, Simon brings to life Shakespeare's unforgettable characters as well as the real man behind the legend.  The play had a record-breaking run in the West End last summer, following a hugely successful tour and staging at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2010. 

Callow's recent stage roles include a hailed performance as Sir Toby Belch in Peter Hall's sold out production of Twelfth Night at The National Theatre, and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Ronald Pickup.  Simon's many films include A Room with a View, Maurice, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love and Christmas Carol: The Movie, and television includes Rome, as Charles Dickens in an episode of Doctor Who and Tom Chance in the series Chance in a Million. 

He has written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles.  His autobiography, My Life in Pieces, was published in 2010 by Nick Hern Books and won the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography.  Simon will release his Dickens Biography this year. 

BEING SHAKESPEARE is written by Jonathan Bate, the pre-eminent Shakespeare biographer and editor of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare: The Complete Works.  He is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and is a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company.  His book, The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), is widely held as the best modern book on Shakespeare, and his most recent book, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, was published in 2010.

BEING SHAKESPEARE is directed by Tom Cairns, Simon's collaborator on A Christmas Carol, whose other theatre work includes Phaedra (Donmar), All About My Mother (Old Vic) and The Odyssey and Aristocrats (National).  Lighting is by Bruno Poet and music and sound by Ben and Max Ringham.  BEING SHAKESPEARE is produced by Ambassador Theatre Group, ACT Productions, and Robert Bartner and Norman Tulchin.

Photo Credit: Paul Clapp