Covering Shakespeare: An Actor's Saga of Near Misses and Dogged Endurance - Hardcover

by David Weston (Author)

David Weston has spent a lifetime acting in Shakespeare's plays, and has been directed by the likes of Sir Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn and Michael Croft. Chosen as Ian McKellen's understudy in the RSC's King Lear, David toured the world and recorded his experiences in his diary, which became the award-winning Covering McKellen: An Understudy's Tale, called 'Salty, evocative and informative' by the Daily Mail. It went on to win the prestigious S.T.R. Theatre Book of the Year Prize for 2011.

In Covering Shakespeare Weston goes even further, tracing his sixty-two year association with the Bard. He has appeared in twenty-nine of the thirty-seven plays, many several times, and has worked with all the major companies to the outmost limits of the Fringe, from Hollywood to Hong Kong, with the great, the mediocre and the forgotten. He has stories and reminiscences about them all, as well as advice for young actors written in his inimitable style.

The book also contains a synopsis of each play and table outlining the total number of lines per character in each of Shakespeare's plays, rediscovered from an 1889 edition of Evenings with Shakespeare: A Handbook to the Study of His Works.

Shortlisted for the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography 2015

Author Biography

David Weston is an English actor, director and author. Since graduating from RADA he has acted in numerous film, television and stage productions, including twenty-nine plays in Shakespeare's canon. With Michael Croft he was a founder member of the National Youth Theatre. He has directed also at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre and a number of other theatres in London. He wrote and narrated a series of non-fiction audio books, including Shakespeare: His Life and Work which won the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Award for best audio non-fiction book. Covering McKellen: An Understudy's Tale won the 2011 Theatre Book Prize. His recently published novel Dodger Down Under was described by the Mail on Sunday as "a delightful Dickensian pastiche which will definitely have the readers clamouring for more."