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

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.”

I would qualify this by saying the modulations in the sitter’s movements are so nuanced as to be often barely perceptible and that the speeches can be activated by the viewer through the press of a button. But the total effect is uncanny and I was intrigued as to how it was done. I was told that Sattari-Hicks and a small crew would record the sitter in a studio using a state-of-the-art camera and then refine the images through hours of post-production. The spoken texts were chosen by the actors in collaboration with the Shakespeare director Ron Daniels, who curated the finished version. Given the actors’ vast experience, that process was usually done in an hour and 20 minutes.

I was struck by the intimacy of the experience. The actors’ faces are seen in close-up as if they had suddenly materialised on the gallery walls. And the texts are spoken in a way that adds to the pervading quietude. Patrick Stewart takes the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V and strips it of rhetoric to show us a man, on the eve of battle, talking to other men: when he suggests that Crispin’s feast will be remembered “from this day to the ending of the world” he does so with modest certainty whereas Olivier on film famously sent the line soaring upwards to the heavens.

In the midst of “To be or not to be” Derek Jacobi inserts a prolonged pause after the lines “To die, to sleep”, pondering the implication of each word. Harriet Walter as Prospero in The Tempest leaves us in no doubt as to the character’s awesome power stressing the key verb in “I have bedimmed the noontide sun”: this, you realise, is a magician who has not only raised the dead from their graves but also created darkness at noon.

The big question is what happens next? The 10 portraits on show are unique collectables which will be on sale to individuals or institutions. But they are the work of a company, StageBlock, co-founded by Sattari-Hicks and Francesco Pierangeli, which has ambitious plans for the future. They are already planning a second volume of Shakespeare Portraits to be recorded in the new year. They also dream of extending the idea of living portraits to other writers and other cultures and of ploughing 10% of the money from placements and exhibitions back into the performing arts.

Given the impressive roster of names in the first exhibition – which also includes David Suchet, Juliet Stevenson, Adrian Lester, Simon Callow, Charles Dance and Frances Barber – there is a good chance that profits will ensue. It’s a bold, visionary new idea for the digital age but I hope it won’t stifle the talent of the individual portraitist. I cherish the notion of, say, Salvador Dalí’s painting of Olivier as Richard III hanging on a gallery wall alongside the mesmerising image of McKellen looking on at one in watchful fascination.