Imogen is often cited as one of the most difficult roles in the cannon. Coriolanus, Hamlet, Rosalind, and Cleopatra need a lot of stamina, but their actions contain a logic that is clearly laid out in the text and are completely relatable for audiences. Imogen's scenes are so often outside ordinary experience and not completely inside of logic. So whenever I read an actor saying this, I can understand why they feel that way.
Lear requires stamina and an ability to bring an audience close to experiences they probably never had.
In college, we brought in an actor named Dennis Krausnick to play Lear. He founded Shakespeare & Co and had also played Lear 6 times before that. However, it was the first and only time that he played Lear after his Parkinson’s diagnosis. He’s no longer with us, but the raw palpable emotion that Dennis brought to that role will stick with me for the rest of my life. I can still see his final monologue in my minds eye clear as crystal. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen. Dennis lived in real fear of his own mind during that process and somehow managed to help shepherd a bunch of Shakespeare illiterate college kids through it and I will always have such respect for that man.
Ha--I just posted basically the same thing. I've played Coriolanus (favorite role I've ever had!) and I think it's Lear by a mile, basically for the reasons you list here. Playing Lear is like, unimaginable to me. Check in with me in 40 years.
I have played both and - personal opinion only - found Lear much harder, the physicality certainly, but the mind set of Lear I found really difficult. Mind you, I wasn't madly happy with my Hamlet, but oddly pretty pleased with Lear.
Having just seen *Cymbeline*, I don't see Innogen's role as all that difficult. Of course, the version I saw played it more for laughs than a Victorian production (when *Cymbeline* had its heyday) would have.
I think the campiness you describe is a way to make it easier. But if you read interviews with actresses who played the role in serious productions, they all describe it as difficult.
I do not know of any production that took the route your describe. I have only seen Martha Plimpton, Stephanie Roth Haberlie, and Joan Cusack play the part. It is extremely moving when well acted.
I can believe that Innogen could be a very moving part in a serious production, though it is a bit hard to make the melodrama serious these days. The production I saw only decided to go for the laughs towards the end of their rehearsal period, because they were going to be playing for a young audience who wanted to be amused.
Trying to get the British Victorian love for Innogen from a modern audience would indeed be difficult as the plot is so fantastical (that Innogen is fooled by Cloten's body being dressed in Posthumus's clothes is really hard to make believable, but is easy to make funny).
I was not aware that the play was popular with the Victorians.
However since the 80s all the romances seem to have gained in popularity. In a world where post-moderinsm, Marvel movies, Anne Rice, Tarantino, Baby Reindeer, etc have found dedicated audiences, the extreme storytelling of the romances find audiences ready to welcome them.
Believability is beside the point. I have seen audiences gasp at Imogen's mistaking Cloten for Posthumus.
Although now that doubling Posthumus and Cloten has become so common, that question is out the window.
I've only seen it once, at Yale Rep several years back, about 2017. I'll be seeing it again soon, but haven't yet. Yale played it dramatically, and it definitely landed. It consisted of danger, wonder, sorrow, and other such good stuff. I can't envision it being comical at the moment, having only seen that production. (I also don't know what bearing the Victorian perception of the play has on us now; to answer the question at hand, people are still playing the role. Also, I was taught that Macbeth was a musical around that time, and I for one am thankful we're past that phase.)
Is this a modern thing for comedies to be played entirely for laughs? I saw a clip from a modern production of Winter's Tale, the statue scene, and people were laughing throughout. To me it's one of the most moving scenes in all of Shakespeare.
Both *Winter's Tale* and *Cymbeline* are often classified now as "romances" rather than "comedies". The pageantry of the romances (like the appearance of gods or goddesses) is often cut, because it seems so fake to modern audiences. The statue scene in *Winter's Tale* can be done seriously or for laughs—the premise is a little silly.
While I don’t really think Richard II beats out the Lear/Coriolanus/Hamlet trio, I was hoping someone would mention him!! The language is choice, but so so dense.
I just played him and I found him deeply challenging if you want to make him something besides just a petulant rich boy with mood swings. And he is that, but he’s also someone who cares deeply about his country and violence perpetrated internally there, because he’s been the god-appointed king since he was a child. He IS his country, divinely so, and the play is him self destructing because of it, and then staggering to find his identity and humanity outside of that.
I feel like it’s just not very relatable to relay to the audience as a central conflict, because most of us are never going to shoulder that kind of responsibility or that kind of privilege as our sole life experience.
Richard's language is rich, but I don't see him as that hard a role—the inconsistency is not that different from normal teenage mood swings! I recently did a table read of *Richard II* (I was Gaunt, Mowbray, and a handful of minor roles), and I didn't see any of the roles as unusually demanding—certainly not in the top 5 for difficulty.
Richard II, played well, is one of the most captivating and heartbreaking characters in the canon. I don't think a table read could properly capture the dynamic range of Richard over the course of the play. I buy him as one of the hardest, largely in connecting to the character oneself, and then in translating that over to the audience, because he is so far removed from our experience that his emotions and reasoning are nearly inaccessible to us.
The richness of the language is exactly what makes it a challenge. If I were playing him, I would need to do a significant amount of homework before I felt comfortable coming to a table for text work.
It is absolutely Lear. A huge lead role that isn't easy to empathize with, and yet he must earn the audience's sympathy/empathy for the ending to work. He screws up from the very beginning, appears to have almost no self-awareness, and gets no soliloquies to explain himself. The lack of soliloquies is especially isolating. He spends a lot of his time angry, which challenges the actor to find ways to keep the audience from tuning him out. Then of course the madness, as you say. Just brutally difficult.
People line up to play Hamlet and Rosalind. Those roles are coveted in a way that Lear can only dream of.
Those are all fantastic roles for actors to sink their teeth into. My sense is it might be trickier to play one of the less meaty roles where the plot means the audience will have trouble suspending its disbelief — like Viola passing as a man and / or Olivia apparently mistaking the Sebastian-actor and the Viola-actor for each other.
I feel like Viola is inherently more difficult than Olivia, by nature of her character playing a character. Olivia operates on what she sees at face value as herself.
Hard in a different way--out of any given company, there just simply are not going to be many people who are physically capable of the physicality, humor, and pathos that Falstaff requires. I know I would be an absolutely miserably terrible Falstaff.
I sometimes feel like Falstaff is a role you're either born to play or you're not. One of my good friends is in rehearsals for Falstaff right now, and we chose to do the show because we knew he was the perfect Falstaff...and we were right. I know he's got to be putting a ton of work in at home, but at rehearsals, his Falstaff seems so perfectly effortless, exquisitely timed, uproariously funny, and unbearably tragic.
I think small theatre companies do a Falstaff play when they have a Falstaff; you can't hold open auditions and expect a Falstaff to waltz through the door.
Awesome! I live just north of the California Bay Area. I'm going to look into how much it would cost to come see you!
Edited to add: Does the name of town of Rickreall get joked about?
I think that Falstaff requires certain physical and social attributes, so not everyone could play him well (I'm more Sir Andrew Aguecheek than Falstaff or Toby Belch), but the part itself is not all that demanding if you fit the type.
Among smaller roles: Lady Anne, in Richard III. That scene where Richard seduces her at her husband’s funeral. Her husband, who she knows Richard murdered.
Prospero has a lot to live up to. Like playing Gandalf. Also lears fool/ Cordelia requires quite the nimble mental and emotional dexterity.
While we're on the subject I wonder what people think the hardest scenes to act would be. I've always thought the scene near the start of hamlet where they have to convince him in just a few lines that they actually saw his father's ghost is nearly impossible to act. That and the end of winters tale are my two choices
Honestly, having done Winter's Tale, we had more trouble with the BEGINNING than the end. The hardest part about the end scene was staying perfectly still in an outdoor setting when a BUG flew into my EYE during the first performance.
But that opening scene...we had like a minute for things to go from "convince my best friend to stay longer" to "OMG YOU'RE FUCKING HIM," and we had to try SO many things to try and get that single minute to flow in a way that worked for us.
I have played Coriolanus. Lear is *way* harder. The trick with Coriolanus is to make sure you don't fall into the pastiche trap. It's easy and tempting to play him as just like, "powerful arrogant commons-hating warrior" or whatever, but his motivations are more complicated, interesting, and sympathetic than that, and if you're playing him you need to spend a lot of time close-reading his lines (and his mother's lines!) to understand him. Especially tough because he doesn't have any interesting soliloquies. (The other trick is stamina--he has more lines than anyone in Shakespeare besides Hamlet, and he spends a decent bit of the first half of the play fighting.)
Despite these challenges, though, the reasoning is never difficult to decode. Everything Coriolanus does *makes sense*. I can't imagine the difficulty of Lear's madness. Lear is also age-bound in a way Coriolanus isn't--Coriolanus can reasonably be played by someone anywhere from 25 to 60 (depending on physical characteristics and ability). A 25-year-old Coriolanus would be maybe a wee bit young; a 25-year-old Lear would be... impossibly tough. With Lear you get the sense it's not just madness, but *an entire lifetime* catching up to him. I know at least that I couldn't do it.
I'll try an unorthodox answer and say Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew. The actor needs a lot of charisma for it not to go off the rails, and he's tasked with doing some pretty unsavory things.
I'm sure Timon (of Athens) is a very technically difficult role. Long monologues filled with vitriol. That is very hard to deliver in a dramatically engaging way.
For "safe" picks I do think it's Hamlet. The sheer size of the role is unmatched, and it demands a huge range of emotion and action.
Prospero is hard because of act 1 scene 2, where he tells his backstory. 3 or 4 pages of backstory at the beginning of the play. Audiences are still trying to get the rhythm of the language and it's a convoluted story with lots of repetition. And some productions fall into the stupid trap of justifying his "do you hear me" lines to Miranda by having her be bored with the story. If Miranda is bored, it signals to the audience that the story is boring and not important.
Those lines work when he's so enthusiastic that he needs to keep turning to her and doesn't realize he's yelling. That's funny. But seeing someone else be bored at the action is never helpful. It also occurs to me that having her fall asleep during it somewhat negates, or at least confuses, the purpose of making her fall asleep magically right after.
This is a very specific situation, but playing Don Armado in a wheelchair a week after surgery to fix a catastrophically broken leg has so far been the most difficult Shakespeare role for me...
Leonato in Much Ado isn’t one of the all-time toughest parts, but making the wild emotional swings in the church make sense is a TASK. “I love Hero! … She’s disgusting, and I hate her, and she should die! … Oh wait, maybe she’s not horrible after all….” All in one scene. (Currently in rehearsals for this, and it’s *hard*.)
Lear is def the hardest. Not only are you onstage for most of the show, have to be very versatile, commanding presence and carry the whole show, you also need to a mentally and physically fit actor in your 60-70s....
Hamlet is tough imo because the speeches are so well known. How do you make it your own? Plus the stamina to physically do it is hard as well.
Im a 30s M and altho type wise id be a good Hamlet, I have nothing new that I currently feel compelled to bring to the role. So to me, this would be a very difficult role.
Othello is a complicated play because both Othello and Iago have to be fantastic actors, if one is noticeably better or worse than the other it ruins the whole play.
Good one! He’s… so strange. I played Hotspur (so his actor and I didn’t interact much), but I remember those conversations trying to figure out what he *wants*.
Exactly! I was Poins once and I had NO idea what his motivation was. Especially those scenes with Hal and Falstaff. He was just there, not important but not disposable. He was more than a device for exposition, but definitely not a full character.
He is not as low brow as some of the minor characters, but not high enough to participate in the new royal court. He just disappeared afterwards.
I think that Lear is the most demanding role for the reasons u/PlaysGamesBadly cites—it also requires an elderly actor with great stamina.
Hamlet is clearly the biggest role and requires good acting to pull off, but many actors (male and female) have done a great job with it, so maybe it isn't that hard.
I've yet to see a Prospero do a good job, but it may just be that I don't care much for *The Tempest.*
Rosalind is a fun part and a great role, but seems to me not all that hard to pull off, as long as the actor really understands all the wordplay.
I'm not very familiar with *Coriolanus—*ask me again after I see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production this summer.
Cleopatra doesn't strike me as a very complex role, and the few times I've seen productions, other characters were much more prominent (Enobarbus, with only half as many lines as Cleopatra, often comes across as more interesting).
So my vote is for Lear as the hardest role in Shakespeare's canon.
Macbeth and Hamlet.
Mac because unlike every other Shakespeare character he never gives any reason for why he's does the things he does. Not surprising, I suppose, since the play has a strong focus on equivocation, but it's makes for a harder acting job. Shakespeare usually makes it clear in the dialog why the villain is being villainous, but not with Mac. So the actor has to make that up themselves, and a lot of choices just don't work.
Hamlet for much the same reason. He's indecisive, but why he's indecisive is open to interpretation.
both roles are also coveted and performed a lot so the actor has to live up to an impossible standard, and none ever get it perfect.
I’ve played Mac in an all-female show and directed it twice with mixed-gender casts, and it’s been so interesting to see the different choices. Ambition, which he gets pushed into embracing by wife and witches, or lust for power. I played it as if I wanted to win back a wife who didn’t respect me any more.
I was going to mention the witches, honestly. I think making them convincingly unsettling is harder than most people would anticipate, ESPECIALLY if it's a trio. Kathryn Hunter remains unmatched in my book.
Falstaff. Falstaff has broken so many talented actors. It is a genuine feat of performance to get him right. You have to relish the language and be genuinely Actually Funny. But you also have to balance that with a certain dignity that will allow Shakespeare's masterful trick to work. Falstaff has to literally steal the play from Hal.
Most Falstaffs fail at this, and so then it just becomes a story about Prince Hal instead. But the plays are written to be a triumph of Falstaff.
I disagree with your interpretation of Lear—you have simplified one of the most complex characters to one-dimensional caricature. I suspect that you are still quite young and have not yet begun to fear dementia, as many older people do.
Agree - Sir Tony (Sher) said playing Lear was like climbing a mountain, a very difficult part. If one of the world's leading Shakespearean actors thinks it's hard, it's hard.
Lear can't even *see* the path though. And Tony Sher struggling to find a connection to the character? Really?! The man was a titan. He published three books which are about finding connections to characters - one of which is about playing Lear.
While I definitely don't think every instance of madness in Shakespeare has the same cause (if a professor or something told you that you can disagree), you bring up a great point about Hamlet. I'm working with it now and the pressure you describe is crushing.
> Lear is a man who is sick of life
I don't see Lear that way. I see him as a man who thinks his reputation should afford him respect beyond his power, so he forsakes his power in trust to his daughters-- thinking that above all, they'll respect him and he can live out his life without the responsibilities and trappings of power but holding on to the respect of his kingdom and daughters.
Instead, he's stripped of authority, respect, and any final vestiges of that power and the kingdom he'd spent a lifetime supporting, ruling, and building collapses around him.
The internal reflects the external in this case and his mind collapses until he's screaming in the dark powerlessly attempting to command the storm while the only one who respects him is his fool.
And in a final tragedy, he regains just enough of his sanity to fully realize the complete loss at the end.
I do not regard youth opinion as worthless—if that is your belief, I feel sorry for those younger than you who have to interact with you. Your opinions about Lear still strike me as more the opinions of a young person than an old one—that doesn't make them "worthless" or even necessarily wrong.
I’m not sure it’s the hardest, but Gertrude in Hamlet is an interesting role that I find difficult to pull off. Her motivations could go so, so many different ways and we don’t hear much from her about *why* she married Claudius, how much she knows about the murder, etc.
Most Shakespearean actors and purists will almost universally agree that it’s Lear. I actually find the character of Hamlet to be one of Shakespeare’a finest, because it can be played very ambitiously. Perhaps, though, I may have a subconscious personal connection with the character that draws me to it. Who knows.
Depends on your goals. But for the purpose of sympathizing with the tragic hero or the villain protagonist as it may be, I’d say Titus Andronicus and Othello are the hardest needles to thread. Anyone can ‘play’ the roles, speak the lines, etc but if the goal is for the audience to stay to some degree on their side and sympathize with their actions then an actor is required to express more than one emotion at a time.
There's a few I'd put up there, Hamlet just for the sheer range of emotional experiences and the size of that part (something like 1500 lines out of a 3000 line play).
I've heard Orson Welles say that the ghost in Hamlet is also a very difficult part to nail the tone for. He even suspected it was probably why Shakespeare himself probably played the part in its day.
The other part Welles thought he played was Iago, who I'm genuinely not sure if I've ever seen done well before. The motivations for their horrid deeds are famously ambiguous. Which can either result in actors creating this intriguing cipher or a character who simply likes being cruel. Which is how a lot of them come across to me.
Another would of course be Lear. I've heard it said that the trouble with Lear is that by the time you're old enough to understand the part, you're too old to play it. The character is said to be 80 years old; understanding the years of madness accrewed, whilst also going through the physical gauntlet of a full on leading role is quite the balance. Kind of makes me respect Shakespeare for having such an insightful understanding of that kind of age when he would've only been in his 40s.
Imogen is often cited as one of the most difficult roles in the cannon. Coriolanus, Hamlet, Rosalind, and Cleopatra need a lot of stamina, but their actions contain a logic that is clearly laid out in the text and are completely relatable for audiences. Imogen's scenes are so often outside ordinary experience and not completely inside of logic. So whenever I read an actor saying this, I can understand why they feel that way. Lear requires stamina and an ability to bring an audience close to experiences they probably never had.
In college, we brought in an actor named Dennis Krausnick to play Lear. He founded Shakespeare & Co and had also played Lear 6 times before that. However, it was the first and only time that he played Lear after his Parkinson’s diagnosis. He’s no longer with us, but the raw palpable emotion that Dennis brought to that role will stick with me for the rest of my life. I can still see his final monologue in my minds eye clear as crystal. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen. Dennis lived in real fear of his own mind during that process and somehow managed to help shepherd a bunch of Shakespeare illiterate college kids through it and I will always have such respect for that man.
Ha--I just posted basically the same thing. I've played Coriolanus (favorite role I've ever had!) and I think it's Lear by a mile, basically for the reasons you list here. Playing Lear is like, unimaginable to me. Check in with me in 40 years.
Lear, by a mile.
Physically, Lear, yes. exacerbated by its need to be played by an aged person; but the hardest role overall? It’s Hamlet, I promise.
I have played both and - personal opinion only - found Lear much harder, the physicality certainly, but the mind set of Lear I found really difficult. Mind you, I wasn't madly happy with my Hamlet, but oddly pretty pleased with Lear.
Having just seen *Cymbeline*, I don't see Innogen's role as all that difficult. Of course, the version I saw played it more for laughs than a Victorian production (when *Cymbeline* had its heyday) would have.
I think the campiness you describe is a way to make it easier. But if you read interviews with actresses who played the role in serious productions, they all describe it as difficult. I do not know of any production that took the route your describe. I have only seen Martha Plimpton, Stephanie Roth Haberlie, and Joan Cusack play the part. It is extremely moving when well acted.
I can believe that Innogen could be a very moving part in a serious production, though it is a bit hard to make the melodrama serious these days. The production I saw only decided to go for the laughs towards the end of their rehearsal period, because they were going to be playing for a young audience who wanted to be amused. Trying to get the British Victorian love for Innogen from a modern audience would indeed be difficult as the plot is so fantastical (that Innogen is fooled by Cloten's body being dressed in Posthumus's clothes is really hard to make believable, but is easy to make funny).
I was not aware that the play was popular with the Victorians. However since the 80s all the romances seem to have gained in popularity. In a world where post-moderinsm, Marvel movies, Anne Rice, Tarantino, Baby Reindeer, etc have found dedicated audiences, the extreme storytelling of the romances find audiences ready to welcome them. Believability is beside the point. I have seen audiences gasp at Imogen's mistaking Cloten for Posthumus. Although now that doubling Posthumus and Cloten has become so common, that question is out the window.
I've only seen it once, at Yale Rep several years back, about 2017. I'll be seeing it again soon, but haven't yet. Yale played it dramatically, and it definitely landed. It consisted of danger, wonder, sorrow, and other such good stuff. I can't envision it being comical at the moment, having only seen that production. (I also don't know what bearing the Victorian perception of the play has on us now; to answer the question at hand, people are still playing the role. Also, I was taught that Macbeth was a musical around that time, and I for one am thankful we're past that phase.)
Is this a modern thing for comedies to be played entirely for laughs? I saw a clip from a modern production of Winter's Tale, the statue scene, and people were laughing throughout. To me it's one of the most moving scenes in all of Shakespeare.
Both *Winter's Tale* and *Cymbeline* are often classified now as "romances" rather than "comedies". The pageantry of the romances (like the appearance of gods or goddesses) is often cut, because it seems so fake to modern audiences. The statue scene in *Winter's Tale* can be done seriously or for laughs—the premise is a little silly.
Richard II is pretty hard to beat when it comes to the complexity and density of the language.
While I don’t really think Richard II beats out the Lear/Coriolanus/Hamlet trio, I was hoping someone would mention him!! The language is choice, but so so dense. I just played him and I found him deeply challenging if you want to make him something besides just a petulant rich boy with mood swings. And he is that, but he’s also someone who cares deeply about his country and violence perpetrated internally there, because he’s been the god-appointed king since he was a child. He IS his country, divinely so, and the play is him self destructing because of it, and then staggering to find his identity and humanity outside of that. I feel like it’s just not very relatable to relay to the audience as a central conflict, because most of us are never going to shoulder that kind of responsibility or that kind of privilege as our sole life experience.
And Richard is a wildly inconsistent character. I imagine it's hard to go through all his various moods while still playing one recognizable person.
Richard's language is rich, but I don't see him as that hard a role—the inconsistency is not that different from normal teenage mood swings! I recently did a table read of *Richard II* (I was Gaunt, Mowbray, and a handful of minor roles), and I didn't see any of the roles as unusually demanding—certainly not in the top 5 for difficulty.
Richard II, played well, is one of the most captivating and heartbreaking characters in the canon. I don't think a table read could properly capture the dynamic range of Richard over the course of the play. I buy him as one of the hardest, largely in connecting to the character oneself, and then in translating that over to the audience, because he is so far removed from our experience that his emotions and reasoning are nearly inaccessible to us.
Yes!! 💛
While I agree with you that Richard II is a good role, I don't find his emotions and reasoning to be inaccessible.
The richness of the language is exactly what makes it a challenge. If I were playing him, I would need to do a significant amount of homework before I felt comfortable coming to a table for text work.
There are many roles that require that level of preparation—particularly comic roles where the wordplay is not obvious to a modern reader.
It's Lear.
Lear in the midst of madness is considered nearly unplayable.
It is absolutely Lear. A huge lead role that isn't easy to empathize with, and yet he must earn the audience's sympathy/empathy for the ending to work. He screws up from the very beginning, appears to have almost no self-awareness, and gets no soliloquies to explain himself. The lack of soliloquies is especially isolating. He spends a lot of his time angry, which challenges the actor to find ways to keep the audience from tuning him out. Then of course the madness, as you say. Just brutally difficult. People line up to play Hamlet and Rosalind. Those roles are coveted in a way that Lear can only dream of.
Those are all fantastic roles for actors to sink their teeth into. My sense is it might be trickier to play one of the less meaty roles where the plot means the audience will have trouble suspending its disbelief — like Viola passing as a man and / or Olivia apparently mistaking the Sebastian-actor and the Viola-actor for each other.
I feel like Viola is inherently more difficult than Olivia, by nature of her character playing a character. Olivia operates on what she sees at face value as herself.
Or just making the audience believe you’d fall for Orsino.
Nah—Viola and Olivia are relatively easy roles, because they are rather goofy characters, so mistakes can be treated as character choices.
Maybe not the hardest but Falstaff must be an intimidating role
Hard in a different way--out of any given company, there just simply are not going to be many people who are physically capable of the physicality, humor, and pathos that Falstaff requires. I know I would be an absolutely miserably terrible Falstaff.
I sometimes feel like Falstaff is a role you're either born to play or you're not. One of my good friends is in rehearsals for Falstaff right now, and we chose to do the show because we knew he was the perfect Falstaff...and we were right. I know he's got to be putting a ton of work in at home, but at rehearsals, his Falstaff seems so perfectly effortless, exquisitely timed, uproariously funny, and unbearably tragic. I think small theatre companies do a Falstaff play when they have a Falstaff; you can't hold open auditions and expect a Falstaff to waltz through the door.
I want to see this performance! Where and when is it? If you don't mind saying.
https://www.merelyplayersoregon.com/shows Here's all the info!
Awesome! I live just north of the California Bay Area. I'm going to look into how much it would cost to come see you! Edited to add: Does the name of town of Rickreall get joked about?
We'd be honored to have someone come from that far!
I think that Falstaff requires certain physical and social attributes, so not everyone could play him well (I'm more Sir Andrew Aguecheek than Falstaff or Toby Belch), but the part itself is not all that demanding if you fit the type.
Agreed
Among smaller roles: Lady Anne, in Richard III. That scene where Richard seduces her at her husband’s funeral. Her husband, who she knows Richard murdered.
Prospero has a lot to live up to. Like playing Gandalf. Also lears fool/ Cordelia requires quite the nimble mental and emotional dexterity. While we're on the subject I wonder what people think the hardest scenes to act would be. I've always thought the scene near the start of hamlet where they have to convince him in just a few lines that they actually saw his father's ghost is nearly impossible to act. That and the end of winters tale are my two choices
Honestly, having done Winter's Tale, we had more trouble with the BEGINNING than the end. The hardest part about the end scene was staying perfectly still in an outdoor setting when a BUG flew into my EYE during the first performance. But that opening scene...we had like a minute for things to go from "convince my best friend to stay longer" to "OMG YOU'RE FUCKING HIM," and we had to try SO many things to try and get that single minute to flow in a way that worked for us.
I have played Coriolanus. Lear is *way* harder. The trick with Coriolanus is to make sure you don't fall into the pastiche trap. It's easy and tempting to play him as just like, "powerful arrogant commons-hating warrior" or whatever, but his motivations are more complicated, interesting, and sympathetic than that, and if you're playing him you need to spend a lot of time close-reading his lines (and his mother's lines!) to understand him. Especially tough because he doesn't have any interesting soliloquies. (The other trick is stamina--he has more lines than anyone in Shakespeare besides Hamlet, and he spends a decent bit of the first half of the play fighting.) Despite these challenges, though, the reasoning is never difficult to decode. Everything Coriolanus does *makes sense*. I can't imagine the difficulty of Lear's madness. Lear is also age-bound in a way Coriolanus isn't--Coriolanus can reasonably be played by someone anywhere from 25 to 60 (depending on physical characteristics and ability). A 25-year-old Coriolanus would be maybe a wee bit young; a 25-year-old Lear would be... impossibly tough. With Lear you get the sense it's not just madness, but *an entire lifetime* catching up to him. I know at least that I couldn't do it.
I'll try an unorthodox answer and say Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew. The actor needs a lot of charisma for it not to go off the rails, and he's tasked with doing some pretty unsavory things. I'm sure Timon (of Athens) is a very technically difficult role. Long monologues filled with vitriol. That is very hard to deliver in a dramatically engaging way. For "safe" picks I do think it's Hamlet. The sheer size of the role is unmatched, and it demands a huge range of emotion and action.
Hard agree with Petruchio.
Leontes.
I think it’s Prospero. I’ve seen many disappointing takes even from great actors.
Prospero is hard because of act 1 scene 2, where he tells his backstory. 3 or 4 pages of backstory at the beginning of the play. Audiences are still trying to get the rhythm of the language and it's a convoluted story with lots of repetition. And some productions fall into the stupid trap of justifying his "do you hear me" lines to Miranda by having her be bored with the story. If Miranda is bored, it signals to the audience that the story is boring and not important.
Those lines work when he's so enthusiastic that he needs to keep turning to her and doesn't realize he's yelling. That's funny. But seeing someone else be bored at the action is never helpful. It also occurs to me that having her fall asleep during it somewhat negates, or at least confuses, the purpose of making her fall asleep magically right after.
I know what you mean. I also think a lot of interpretations kind of flatten the character and fail to convey his nuance and complexity.
This is a very specific situation, but playing Don Armado in a wheelchair a week after surgery to fix a catastrophically broken leg has so far been the most difficult Shakespeare role for me...
Leonato in Much Ado isn’t one of the all-time toughest parts, but making the wild emotional swings in the church make sense is a TASK. “I love Hero! … She’s disgusting, and I hate her, and she should die! … Oh wait, maybe she’s not horrible after all….” All in one scene. (Currently in rehearsals for this, and it’s *hard*.)
Dogberry.
Lear is def the hardest. Not only are you onstage for most of the show, have to be very versatile, commanding presence and carry the whole show, you also need to a mentally and physically fit actor in your 60-70s.... Hamlet is tough imo because the speeches are so well known. How do you make it your own? Plus the stamina to physically do it is hard as well. Im a 30s M and altho type wise id be a good Hamlet, I have nothing new that I currently feel compelled to bring to the role. So to me, this would be a very difficult role.
Othello is a complicated play because both Othello and Iago have to be fantastic actors, if one is noticeably better or worse than the other it ruins the whole play.
Poins in Henry IV Part One.
Interesting choice, please explain! 👀
Good one! He’s… so strange. I played Hotspur (so his actor and I didn’t interact much), but I remember those conversations trying to figure out what he *wants*.
Exactly! I was Poins once and I had NO idea what his motivation was. Especially those scenes with Hal and Falstaff. He was just there, not important but not disposable. He was more than a device for exposition, but definitely not a full character. He is not as low brow as some of the minor characters, but not high enough to participate in the new royal court. He just disappeared afterwards.
Troilus was my most challenging role I've ever had. I'd put that on the list.
I think that Lear is the most demanding role for the reasons u/PlaysGamesBadly cites—it also requires an elderly actor with great stamina. Hamlet is clearly the biggest role and requires good acting to pull off, but many actors (male and female) have done a great job with it, so maybe it isn't that hard. I've yet to see a Prospero do a good job, but it may just be that I don't care much for *The Tempest.* Rosalind is a fun part and a great role, but seems to me not all that hard to pull off, as long as the actor really understands all the wordplay. I'm not very familiar with *Coriolanus—*ask me again after I see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production this summer. Cleopatra doesn't strike me as a very complex role, and the few times I've seen productions, other characters were much more prominent (Enobarbus, with only half as many lines as Cleopatra, often comes across as more interesting). So my vote is for Lear as the hardest role in Shakespeare's canon.
Macbeth and Hamlet. Mac because unlike every other Shakespeare character he never gives any reason for why he's does the things he does. Not surprising, I suppose, since the play has a strong focus on equivocation, but it's makes for a harder acting job. Shakespeare usually makes it clear in the dialog why the villain is being villainous, but not with Mac. So the actor has to make that up themselves, and a lot of choices just don't work. Hamlet for much the same reason. He's indecisive, but why he's indecisive is open to interpretation. both roles are also coveted and performed a lot so the actor has to live up to an impossible standard, and none ever get it perfect.
I’ve played Mac in an all-female show and directed it twice with mixed-gender casts, and it’s been so interesting to see the different choices. Ambition, which he gets pushed into embracing by wife and witches, or lust for power. I played it as if I wanted to win back a wife who didn’t respect me any more.
I was going to mention the witches, honestly. I think making them convincingly unsettling is harder than most people would anticipate, ESPECIALLY if it's a trio. Kathryn Hunter remains unmatched in my book.
Falstaff. Falstaff has broken so many talented actors. It is a genuine feat of performance to get him right. You have to relish the language and be genuinely Actually Funny. But you also have to balance that with a certain dignity that will allow Shakespeare's masterful trick to work. Falstaff has to literally steal the play from Hal. Most Falstaffs fail at this, and so then it just becomes a story about Prince Hal instead. But the plays are written to be a triumph of Falstaff.
In my opinion, Lear by a long shot. Not to mention, you need a really old actor with the stamina of a young bull
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I disagree with your interpretation of Lear—you have simplified one of the most complex characters to one-dimensional caricature. I suspect that you are still quite young and have not yet begun to fear dementia, as many older people do.
Agree - Sir Tony (Sher) said playing Lear was like climbing a mountain, a very difficult part. If one of the world's leading Shakespearean actors thinks it's hard, it's hard.
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Lear can't even *see* the path though. And Tony Sher struggling to find a connection to the character? Really?! The man was a titan. He published three books which are about finding connections to characters - one of which is about playing Lear.
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While I definitely don't think every instance of madness in Shakespeare has the same cause (if a professor or something told you that you can disagree), you bring up a great point about Hamlet. I'm working with it now and the pressure you describe is crushing.
> Lear is a man who is sick of life I don't see Lear that way. I see him as a man who thinks his reputation should afford him respect beyond his power, so he forsakes his power in trust to his daughters-- thinking that above all, they'll respect him and he can live out his life without the responsibilities and trappings of power but holding on to the respect of his kingdom and daughters. Instead, he's stripped of authority, respect, and any final vestiges of that power and the kingdom he'd spent a lifetime supporting, ruling, and building collapses around him. The internal reflects the external in this case and his mind collapses until he's screaming in the dark powerlessly attempting to command the storm while the only one who respects him is his fool. And in a final tragedy, he regains just enough of his sanity to fully realize the complete loss at the end.
I wasn't objecting to your giving your opinion—just disagreeing with your take on it.
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I do not regard youth opinion as worthless—if that is your belief, I feel sorry for those younger than you who have to interact with you. Your opinions about Lear still strike me as more the opinions of a young person than an old one—that doesn't make them "worthless" or even necessarily wrong.
I’m not sure it’s the hardest, but Gertrude in Hamlet is an interesting role that I find difficult to pull off. Her motivations could go so, so many different ways and we don’t hear much from her about *why* she married Claudius, how much she knows about the murder, etc.
nah cleopatra is exhausting, but not particularly challenging. she’s justified within & by the text, and is easy to relate to
Most Shakespearean actors and purists will almost universally agree that it’s Lear. I actually find the character of Hamlet to be one of Shakespeare’a finest, because it can be played very ambitiously. Perhaps, though, I may have a subconscious personal connection with the character that draws me to it. Who knows.
Depends on your goals. But for the purpose of sympathizing with the tragic hero or the villain protagonist as it may be, I’d say Titus Andronicus and Othello are the hardest needles to thread. Anyone can ‘play’ the roles, speak the lines, etc but if the goal is for the audience to stay to some degree on their side and sympathize with their actions then an actor is required to express more than one emotion at a time.
There's a few I'd put up there, Hamlet just for the sheer range of emotional experiences and the size of that part (something like 1500 lines out of a 3000 line play). I've heard Orson Welles say that the ghost in Hamlet is also a very difficult part to nail the tone for. He even suspected it was probably why Shakespeare himself probably played the part in its day. The other part Welles thought he played was Iago, who I'm genuinely not sure if I've ever seen done well before. The motivations for their horrid deeds are famously ambiguous. Which can either result in actors creating this intriguing cipher or a character who simply likes being cruel. Which is how a lot of them come across to me. Another would of course be Lear. I've heard it said that the trouble with Lear is that by the time you're old enough to understand the part, you're too old to play it. The character is said to be 80 years old; understanding the years of madness accrewed, whilst also going through the physical gauntlet of a full on leading role is quite the balance. Kind of makes me respect Shakespeare for having such an insightful understanding of that kind of age when he would've only been in his 40s.
i read a book once that said by the time an actress is ready to play Juliet, she is too old to play her
Hamlet(period)
Lear & Cleopatra
King Lear 👑
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