There’s a longstanding practice of an era’s great Shakespeare actors having their portraits documented by their painterly peers. William Hogarth depicted David Garrick as Richard III on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. Thomas Lawrence captured John Philip Kemble spotlit and wrapped in a toga disguise as Coriolanus. And, perhaps most famously, John Singer Sargent presented a disturbing vision of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, her eyes haunted, her flowing dress dappled and glittering.
An exhibition at Red Eight Gallery near the Royal Exchange in the City of London picks up on the tradition, but updates it for our digital age. Here, the stage’s great actors are also its stars of television and film. The result is uncanny, playful, and futuristic.
Actress Juliet Stevenson. Photo: courtesy Stage Block.
“The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I),” which runs through January 10, 2025, features 10 living actors in digital portraits that are anything but static. In a form not dissimilar from Harry Potter’s living portraits, their gazes shift subtly and their expressions slowly morph through a catalog of emotions.
The portraits are the product of Stage Block, a technology studio set on creating a new type of collectable. Just as in the past, the actors arrived at a studio and posed to have their portrait taken (each one took roughly 80 minutes), only they were captured not by brush but by a state-of-the-art camera with most of the work taking place in post-production.
Patrick Stewart, center, alongside Adrian Lester, left, and Derek Jacobi, right. Photo: courtesy Stage Block.
The kicker? At a click of a button, these eerily alive actors pronounce a Shakespearean soliloquy of their choice. Ian McKellen delivers “all the world’s a stage” from As You Like It, Derek Jacobi offers up Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” Harriet Walter’s turns to Prospero “Ye elves of hills” from The Tempest, David Suchet performs Macbeth’s infamous lines on the futility of life “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (a role Suchet has never played).
Installation view of “The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I).” Photo: courtesy of Stage Block.
The 10 portraits are unique, one-off collectables (they are “on-chain” i.e. recorded on the blockchain) that Stage Block hopes will appeal to both individuals and institutions. The London-based company calls the portraits, “a new chapter in the convergence of portraiture and performing arts assembling some of the most revered actors of our time.”
Stage Block collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s honorary associate director Ron Daniels for the project and as suggested by the show’s title — Act I — Stage Block is planning to create a second round of Shakespeare Portraits in 2025.
The founders Sattari-Hicks and Francesco Pierangeli, whose backgrounds span finance, entertainment academia hope to replicate the template of “The Shakespeare Portraits” to other artistic disciplines.