GRAMGreat actors have always attracted artists. I think of Edmundo Kean wild-eyed and demonic like George Clint’s Sir Giles Overreach; Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth dressed in green preserved by John Singer Sargent; and Ruskin Spear’s study in oils of Laurence Olivier like a tormented and guilt-ridden Macbeth. For more than a century it has also been possible to record the voices of our main actors. But what would happen if image and sound were combined?
An answer can be found in a radical new exhibition called Shakespeare’s portraits in sight in the Red Eight Gallerywhich can be found in Cornhill in the city of London, next to the Royal Exchange. The show consists of 10 digital portraits of living actors accompanied by speeches from Shakespeare’s plays. I can explain it better with an example. I sat beneath a large framed image by Ian McKellen and as I spoke to the exhibition’s creative director, Arsalan Sattari-HicksI noticed that Sir Ian’s head moved occasionally, that his gaze changed subtly, and that his features expressed a variety of emotions. At one point I even heard him deliver a fragment of “All the World’s a Stage” from As You Like It with his characteristic virtuosity. Richard Brierley, director of the gallery, put it succinctly when he told me: “Normally the portrait is passive and you are the active one. In this case the portrait is active and you are passive.”
I would qualify this by saying that the modulations in the model’s movements are so nuanced that they are often barely noticeable and that the viewer can activate the speeches with the press of a button. But the overall effect is amazing and I was intrigued by how it was done. I was told that Sattari-Hicks and a small team would film the model in a studio using a state-of-the-art camera and then refine the images through hours of post-production. The spoken texts were chosen by the actors in collaboration with Shakespeare director Ron Daniels, who was in charge of the final version. Given the vast experience of the actors, this process was usually done in one hour and 20 minutes.
I was surprised by the intimacy of the experience. The actors’ faces are seen in close-up as if they had suddenly materialized on the gallery walls. And the texts are spoken in a way that contributes to general tranquility. Patrick Stewart takes Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech and strips it of rhetoric to show us a man, on the eve of battle, speaking to other men: when he suggests that Crispin’s feast will be remembered “from this day to the end of the world” does so with modest certainty, while Olivier in the film sent the line soaring into the heavens.
In the middle of “To be or not to be,” Derek Jacobi inserts a long pause after the lines “To die, to sleep,” reflecting on the implications of each word. Harriet Walter as Prospero in The Tempest leaves us in no doubt about the character’s awesome power by emphasizing the key verb in “I have darkened the noonday sun”: this, you realize, is a wizard who has not only raised the dead from their graves. but it also created darkness at noon.
The big question is what will happen next? The 10 portraits on display are unique collector’s items that will be for sale to individuals or institutions. But they are the work of a company, StageBlock, co-founded by Sattari-Hicks and Francesco Pierangeli, that has ambitious plans for the future. They are already planning to record a second volume of Portraits of Shakespeare in the new year. They also dream of extending the idea of living portraits to other writers and other cultures and of reinvesting 10% of the money from placements and exhibitions in the performing arts.
Given the impressive list of names in the first exhibition, which also includes David Suchet, Juliet Stevenson, Adrian Lester, Simon Callow, Charles Dance and Frances Barber, there is every chance of a profit to be made. It’s a bold and visionary new idea for the digital age, but I hope it doesn’t stifle the talent of the individual portrait painter. I appreciate the idea of, say, Salvador Dali’s painting of Olivier as Richard III hanging on a gallery wall next to the fascinating image of McKellen gazing at you in attentive fascination.