Shakespeare Magazine 11

Samira Ahmed
National Theatre as a treat after the exams and I
suddenly realised how it was a place where you
could feel comfortable and enjoy yourself. Little
things, like her buying us programmes and ice
creams, that made it fun. That started me off.
After I graduated I started going regularly to the
National and the Barbican when the RSC was
there and started following the careers of all these
young talents like Simon Russell Beale and Penny
Downie and Ralph Fiennes, who I first saw in The
Plantagenets. To interview some of them 20 years
later as their careers mature has been all the more
delightful as a result.”
You told me that you had “the best
Shakespeare teacher in the world at
university”. Can you tell us about this
experience, and what kind of light it shone
onto Shakespeare for you.
“I was lucky to be taught by Reggie Alton shortly
before he retired at St Edmund Hall, Oxford,
where I read English. He was such a kind and
modest tutor but so brilliant. We didn’t do
Shakespeare until the second or third year of our
degree, so by the time we got to it I was a bit jaded
and, after all the detail of study for A-level and
Oxbridge entrance, I didn’t think there was much
more to learn.
“But little things – the way he recited lines was
really moving, the way he explained the power of
the ideas in the lines – took me by surprised and
jolted me out of my complacency. He made me
fall in love with Much Ado – probably my favourite
play ever since. We would read out extracts in class
and once he told me afterwards that I was rather
good and he could tell there was a performer in me.
I was so incredibly flattered that he thought so, and
it boosted my confidence.
“Reggie had fought in the War and been
decorated and then come back to college to teach,
but never talked about the terrible things he’d seen.
I tried to imagine how that must have affected such
a sensitive man when he studied all those history
plays about violence and cruelty. He made callow
young students like me learn to trust our instincts
on analysing writing. I felt ashamed if I did inferior
work. It took me years to realise how much his
lessons had influenced me. They changed my
attitude to everything.”
Ralph Fiennes’ Richard III at London’s Almeida Theatre
made a powerful impression on Samira.
I’m going to quote some rather fabulous
words of your own back at you: “I saw
Richard III last night with Ralph Fiennes and
have come up with a whole theory about
that play and Hamlet…” Tell us more!
“It just came to me after watching Ralph Fiennes’
Richard III. Richard is Hamlet’s evil twin. An
Anti-Hamlet. A Hamlet of Dark Matter. A mirrorimage.
The plays were only written a few years
apart. They’re both 30-ish. Richard was apparently
32 when he died. Both are on a mission within
a family dynasty to gain the throne, both treat
wives/girlfriends and mothers pretty appallingly.
But where one is crippled by procrastination,
Richard is all action despite his physical disabilities.
Both have a direct relationship with the audience
through soliloquies, and when Hamlet speaks
of “how all occasions do inform against me” – it
could be Richard, not Fortinbras that he’s watching
with admiration and self-loathing. Imagine them
confronting each other through a portal between
dimensions. I can imagine Fiennes’ Hamlet seeing
his Richard III and realising that, in a way, there’s
really nothing between them.”
You also said that the Ralph Fiennes
Richard III gave you “very violent dreams”.
I’m intrigued by this statement, as a lot of
shakespeare magazine 23