BAM: Being Shakespeare Tickets

know about Shakespeare's famous characters, but what do we know about the Bard himself? In a tour-de-force performance, veteran actor Simon Callow illuminates the man behind the roles in this compelling one-man play by preeminent Shakespeare biographer Jonathan Bate, directed and designed by Tom Cairns. An aging Lear, disintegrating with his kingdom. A cryptic Ophelia, driven mad by madness. Hamlet, hell-bent on revenge. All of them came from the brain of Shakespeare, but what do we know about the Bard himself? In a tour-de-force performance, veteran actor Simon Callow (the original Roman Mozart in Amadeus on stage, the film Shakespeare in Love) assumes the daunting challenge of illuminating the man behind the roles in this utterly compelling one-man play by preeminent Shakespeare biographer Jonathan Bate, directed and designed by Tom Cairns. Channeling Macbeth and Henry V here, musing over Shakespeare’s childhood there, Callow leaps from anecdote to soliloquy, using the famous Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It as his guide to consider how a glovemaker’s son could have gone on to write the world.

Simon Callow • Johnathan Bate • Tom Cairns
April 4 — 14, 2012

"A memorably multidimensional picture of Shakespeare steeped in scholarship and love." -The Guardian (UK)

"Stuff Elizabethan dreams were made on."- Time Out (UK)

"Fantastic! Mr. Callow is the Bard to the bone, a genuine tour de force!" -Daily Mail (UK)