More than just smarts

When National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner offered him the chance to direct a revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1972 classic, “Jumpers,” David Leveaux readily agreed. The key reason, he says, was Simon Russell Beale.

“You don’t think of doing ‘Jumpers’ unless you have an actor who can carry George Moore,” says Leveaux, “and there are few in any generation who can do that.”

The actor who would be playing Stoppard’s passionately intellectual protagonist Moore is no stranger to Stoppard. In the National’s 1996 revival of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” Russell Beale played Guildenstern, to the delight of the playwright.

“I said it was a wonderful piece of casting,” Stoppard says. “Most very good actors tend to represent feeling more than intellect or the other way around. Simon communicates feeling as well as intellect.”

Both play and player received rave reviews in the National’s production of “Jumpers,” which opened in June and moved to the West End in November. Now, led by Russell Beale and costar Essie Davis, Stoppard’s witty tangle of murder, marriage, philosophy and song opens on Broadway on April 25.

Russell Beale, 43, inhabits Moore, a distracted philosopher in a shapeless cardigan. When we meet him, Moore is calmly writing, then dictating remarks on the existence of God while, next door at his grand Mayfair home, his wife Dotty, a fading music hall star, is singing; his usually staid secretary is doing a striptease while swinging from a chandelier; and several gymnasts in yellow jumpsuits form a pyramid until one is inconveniently shot.

“Tom Stoppard has this fearsome reputation as a bedazzler, but he himself has such a keen delight in intellectual effort,” Russell Beale says over tea and scones. “He says he’s been happiest in his life in his study, and that’s George.”

Russell Beale appears to feel the same way. An actor whose name is usually preceded in the British press with words such as “sublime,” “engrossing” or “fearless,” he, too, is fiercely passionate about ideas and readily conveys his excitement in studying philosophy to take on “Jumpers.”

“I knew a few basic things, but obviously I had to do a crash course in Western philosophy,” Russell Beale says. “The philosophy in itself is not that complicated -- although if you went deeper into it, it would become complicated -- but there are lots of tricks Tom uses to make it seem more complicated than it is: George stops and starts and tries to find his way. I occasionally want to say to the audience, ‘Don’t worry, just relax, it’s fine.’ ”

Challenging roles

Russell Beale’s Moore prowls his study, talking to his pet tortoise Pat or reciting chunks of his philosophical treatise, blissfully ignoring his attractive wife’s cavorting next door with her psychiatrist. And whether his subject is philosophy, love or mayhem, he wraps Stoppard’s language in what the playwright calls his “bottomless depths of feeling and sense of his own humanity.”

“I was writing about intellect more than sensual man, and I always felt I have been and need to be the beneficiary of any blood heat the actor can bring to that role,” Stoppard says. “Simon is a very gratifying actor to the author. He’s saying to the author, ‘Look what you did, there’s so much feeling in this character and you did it.’ And the author is saying, ‘You did it.’ ”

Russell Beale uses words like “slippery” and “tricky” to describe “Jumpers,” thinking aloud about how to place it in Stoppard’s canon of plays. “It’s a young man’s play, and he’s just firing on all cylinders. It’s vaudevillian. It’s not the great late works.

“But -- and it’s an important ‘but’ -- it’s got the seeds of what he later would do with the breakdown of a marriage in ‘The Real Thing’ and with ‘The Invention of Love,’ which is about the emotional security and delight of intellectual endeavor. Most important is that it’s a young man’s play. He’s thinking, ‘Let’s have entertainment,’ and if, by the by, we can discuss the biggest question of all -- as he says, ‘Is God?’ -- so much the better.”

Russell Beale enjoys challenges like that. He’s tackled not just Uncle Vanya and Iago but Richard III and Hamlet, often for director Sam Mendes and often in productions that later transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Such portrayals have led to London’s Observer Magazine calling him “almost certainly the greatest classical actor of his generation.”

“In that way that great actors are, when Simon is acting is when he feels truly complete,” Leveaux says. “He carries with him a very mysterious feeling of incompleteness when he’s not acting.”

Belief in live performance

Perhaps it’s his background. Born in Malaya, Russell Beale was educated at boarding schools in England as his parents and younger siblings moved on to Hong Kong, Libya, Germany and Singapore. His family finally settled in Wiltshire, two hours west of London, when he was 15, but until then, he’d simply fly out to see them somewhere on school holidays. Says Russell Beale: “I don’t have any roots anywhere.”

He comes from a family of physicians. In addition to his father, now a retired army doctor, and his late mother, his younger sister and twin brothers all became doctors. Although he too expected to join the profession, he says “a particularly brilliant English teacher” encouraged him toward literature and Cambridge.

After a stint at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Russell Beale went on to work at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. “Simon was a noticeable actor almost from the starting gun,” Stoppard says. “I certainly knew that his wishing to do Guildenstern was a stroke of luck for the play.”

The actor makes his Broadway debut in “Jumpers,” a production set for 20 weeks at New York’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre. He recently played Churchill in the film “Dunkirk” on British television and says he expects to star in “Macbeth” at London’s Almeida Theatre early next year. “Galileo” is being talked about, he adds, saying, “I’d love to do it. It’s finding the time and space.”

He’s performed in such films as “An Ideal Husband,” but says film work is “not the motor. I am a passionate believer in live performance. The great luck I’ve had is that I’ve [performed] some of the greatest writing ever penned. Nothing else can compare to that.”