Lend me your ears: great Shakespearean actors given hi-tech talking portraits

A radical new exhibition celebrates stars including Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart by combining subtly moving artworks with their own voices. The results are uncanny

Great actors have always attracted artists. I think of Edmund Kean looking wild-eyed and demonic as Sir Giles Overreach painted by George Clint; Ellen Terry as a green-gowned Lady Macbeth preserved by John Singer Sargent; and Ruskin Spear’s study in oils of Laurence Olivier as a tormented, guilt-haunted Macbeth. For well over a century, it has also been possible to record the voices of our leading actors. But what would happen if image and sound were combined?

One answer is to be found in a radical new exhibition called The Shakespeare Portraits on view at the Red Eight Gallery, which can be found in the City of London’s Cornhill alongside the Royal Exchange. The show consists of 10 digital portraits of living actors accompanied by speeches from Shakespeare plays. I can best explain by example. I sat beneath a large, framed image of Ian McKellen and as I spoke to the exhibition’s creative director, Arsalan Sattari-Hicks, I realised that Sir Ian’s head was occasionally moving, that his gaze was subtly shifting and his features expressing a variety of emotions. At one point I even heard him speaking a fragment of “All the world’s a stage” from As You Like It with characteristic virtuosity. Richard Brierley, the gallery’s director, put it succinctly when he told me: “Normally the portrait is passive and you are the active one. In this case the portrait is active and you are passive.”