‘The unconscious mind has only a few characters to play with’
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
Hamlet is a good person, and he is, although clouded by doubt, confusion and revengeful feeling, a very sane and rational being. To distort him otherwise or see him as a vehicle for an actor’s personal feelings, or a vehicle for theatrical braggadocio, is beset with dangers, although often attempted, and sometimes achieved. Just as Jacobi, on balance and over a long classical career, could not usually convey violent evil consistently, so Ian did not – or not yet anyway – excel at goodness and balanced normality.
One plausible theory is that Hamlet is a play about Shakespeare’s lost son, Hamnet, who died aged eleven-and-a-half. There is embedded in the play a very deep sense of grief, and of what might have been, frequently expressed by other characters: Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia and Fortinbras. This interpretation is not mine alone, and it holds together a difficult conception of what is in many ways a flawed masterpiece, challenging to any aspiring actor.
The choice of the director is of paramount importance with this play as no other. One good example is Peter Hall’s Hamlet with David Warner as an outstanding, soulful Prince. Voicing his ambition, after Richard II and Edward II, McKellen broadcast his desire to play Hamlet at Stratford, with Trevor Nunn directing. But while the Royal Shakespeare Company offered him a three-year contract, Nunn’s participation was not forthcoming – though he repeatedly affirmed ‘Ian is a brilliant, brilliant actor’ – and so Ian declined the offer. Prospect, where his standing was high, said yes to the idea. But Toby Robertson, who had always in mind to direct Jacobi in the role, and did so later, did not, as he had in Edward II, want to direct Ian. Instead McKellen called on Robert Chetwyn, who had been Ian’s director at Ipswich and, according to his agent, was determined that Hamlet should be seen in the West End.
Chetwyn, eight years older than Ian, a tall, bespectacled and mild-mannered man, who could ‘turn the screws in rehearsal’, came into the production on the crest of popular success, having directed since Ipswich a six-and-a-half-year run with There’s a Girl in My Soup and then, just prior to Hamlet, No Sex Please, We’re British; he had also done Joe Orton’s posthumous What the Butler Saw at the Queen’s Theatre, an unfortunate choice for Ralph Richardson to star in, which gave rise to the following, as far as I know, unrecorded incident.
This was when conventional West End theatre was turning to the challenge of making lunacy fashionable and subtle. Binkie Beaumont had taken the script to John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson on Joe Orton’s specific request (one that most believed was a dark joke of his), while his agent Peggy Ramsay and Oscar Lewenstein respected his wishes because of his horrific murder by his partner Kenneth Halliwell. Gielgud said no, but Richardson was attracted by it and said he’d do it, provided certain cuts were made. He would not, for instance, discuss the size of Winston Churchill’s genitals: reluctantly Peggy Ramsay agreed – and they substituted a cigar for the phallus! When they showed the script to Sylvia Watson, head of the board at the Haymarket Theatre, where Orton’s play was to be performed, she asked to have some words explained – the first was ‘homosexual’. After quiet previews the first night dissolved in fracas as members of the audience shouted ‘Filth’ and ‘Get off the stage’ and ‘Give back your knighthood’. One headline next day said, ‘Dead Playwright Booed by Gallery’.
Richardson, who put money into the production, had been tempted by such lines as ‘Lunatics are melodramatic. The subtleties of drama are wasted on them.’ But throughout the run he betrayed his classic symptoms of non-identification with the role, with the purpose of the play, and with Orton’s stated intention, which was to shock the audience and be obscene. His main stricture on Orton’s work, in spite of a conscious effort to overcome it, came from deep within him: it was, as Peggy Ramsay said, that he could not enjoy himself. He was unable to find anything of himself in the role that would enable him to relax.
What the Butler Saw signified there was now a seismic change in the cultural perception of madness, and also of homosexuality. In Orton’s perception, these factors placing people outside society were strongly linked. His interest may have had something to do with helping mentally ill people, but was likely more to do with effecting a revolutionary change in society’s consciousness. Richardson dipped his toe in Orton, and then believed he had made a terrible mistake. Neither he nor Gielgud, Olivier, nor later Scofield and Jacobi, would go near Beckett and Orton, and were circumspect about Pinter.
This new perception of madness was crucial background colour to Ian’s Hamlet. Ian and Chetwyn had shared a grouse in common because it galled Chetwyn that he had never been asked to direct at the National Theatre, which he ascribed to his working-class background and (according to Michael Coveney, his obituarist) his lack of standing with the directorial mafia. Now they could get their own back. Chetwyn had some quite fanciful ideas about how they would do Hamlet, which they discussed at length, and to which Ian agreed. To begin with, the set would be all mirrors, justified as being a recurring image in the play. Instead of one they would have three ghosts, to which Chetwyn added the unconventional notion that the stage would be ‘covered with ghosts and Fortinbras’s army, which in reality was only about five people, looked [sic] like thousands’.
Chetwyn convinced Ian with his concept that the ghost was not real, but all in Hamlet’s mind, in other words a hallucination, so later it fitted to have him put in a straitjacket when he is sent to England (where everyone is as mad as he). Patrick Wymark, cast as Claudius, was quite circumspect about this, even confused: ‘McKellen says they have no fancy interpretation to offer; the play is quite difficult enough … But this is broadly how they are seeing it: Hamlet is first shown as an extremely depressed little boy finding everything possible wrong with his world. Then he sees the ghost of his father which, Mr McKellen says, is a “mind-blowing experience…”‘
When they rehearsed at the London Welsh Club on the Gray’s Inn Road, McKellen had another Cambridge mafia figure, Julian Curry, as Horatio, and some other good friends, Susan Fleetwood (Ophelia), James Cairncross (Polonius/First Gravedigger), Nickolas Grace (Second Gravedigger/Player Queen) and Faith Brook, who portrayed Gertrude as increasingly weepy and alcoholic. Somehow rehearsals, once under way, did not reflect the comfortable set-up, for Grace observed how Ian and Chetwyn just focused on Hamlet himself and the immediate scenes affecting him, while the cast did not understand the concept of mirrors. Ian grew isolated and cut himself off. While a ‘wonderful leader when he was happy,’ says Grace, when he wasn’t, this made for a ‘production with bumpy gear changes’. When it opened in Nottingham, Toby Robertson did not like the production at all, while again in the Second Gravedigger’s view the vibes on the first night were pretty awful, with everyone trying to say, ‘Well done,’ but finding themselves unable to. Ian himself was frustrated and grumbled to his friends such as Cottrell, ‘What’s wrong with it, what can we do?’ No one was brave enough to tell him, prompting him to feel even more depressed, for as he said, when questioned many years later in 1990, what made him depressed was, ‘When I act badly and no one seems to notice.’
Toby Robertson did not want the production to be seen in London, in spite of having the same ‘youth’ appeal as Richard II and Edward II. The Nottingham Post described McKellen’s Prince Hamlet as a ‘seventeenth-century loner on a mental LSD trip … you’d almost take him as a modern youth’. Yet Ian and Elspeth, his agent, were determined in spite of tepid management and poor reviews to bring it to the West End. They persuaded Eddie Kulukundis, the generous impresario and Greek shipping magnate, to back it, as a springboard, and then send it on a continental tour to recoup big financial rewards. Opposition was strong, voiced by Peter Ansorge, editor of Plays and Players: ‘McKellen gives a sudden, shuddering emphasis to lines which seem to bear little or no relationship to his or any other interpretation of the play.’ ‘Self-intoxicated febrile juvenile,’ fumed another critic, with diction of ‘incredible eccentricity’. ‘The best thing about Ian McKellen’s Hamlet is his curtain call,’ wrote Harold Hobson. The lamentable list went on and on. Yet defiantly McKellen told Wymark it was the best thing he had done so far – whatever the critics might say. He was suspicious ‘that a lot of people hate me as an actor’.
There were continental raves and applause on tour, especially in Rome, where Faith Brook, with her ‘befuddled doll’ Gertrude, said all the audience was on drugs and Ian took fifteen curtain calls, exclaiming, ‘I feel like Donald Wolfit’ – referring to the great actor-manager of the mid-twentieth century, now out of fashion but famed at the time for his barnstorming Lear and Hamlet. Now on top form, basking in the adulation and enjoying la dolce vita off-stage, Ian, Grace tells me, in the fight scene with Laertes stabbed his own eyes with two fingers to bring tears to them. Yet still, with his psychotic approach, Ian apparently had made a fundamental misconception about who and what Hamlet was. Indeed, Hobson had said Ian lacked any compulsive conception in his performance, and that the ‘whole evening created an impression of a Wolfit production without Wolfit’.
McKellen remained ambivalent about Hamlet. Many years later he turned against the role and in 1989 vented his anger in the Independent, exclaiming that ‘Peter O’Toole was right when he said it was just one long wank from beginning to end – pure self-indulgence. So much of the play encourages you to be self-obsessed and neurotic … any actor more than thirty is dreary – Hamlet should be eighteen, a kid – otherwise his behaviour is inexcusable.’
He might have consoled himself that he did not come off as badly as Alec Guinness who had, twenty years before, among other eccentricities and lapses, cast Kenneth Tynan as his Player King. Tynan called Guinness’s performance ‘Hamlet with the pilot dropped’. Guinness took on himself the full responsibility: ‘It was my fault, don’t blame yourselves,’ he told his cast after the first-night curtain came down. ‘I gave up in the first act.’ Hamlet takes its toll on good actors.
Ian’s constant revisionist spirit chipped in later with the claim that when Hamlet meets the ghost, it was immaterial whether the audience believes in ghosts or not. Much later, in 1980, McKellen was to say, ‘The play is not about ghosts, it is about Hamlet’s inner life, about his meeting with his own conscience, about his settlement with his friends, with his family and with himself. It is about a young person’s search and that is why this play has always fascinated young people. And Hamlet is no dreamer, he is a person who thinks.’ Ian was yet again reflecting on a very different view of the actor, himself, not quite knowing who or what he was when he played the Prince.
Hamlet is at heart a father-son play and implicit in it and in every aspect of Hamlet’s character was Shakespeare’s own grief over his son Hamnet’s death. It may be stretching a point but perhaps Ian’s difficulty with the part connected with his father. Ian and Denis had been affected by non-communication before Denis died. There had been no row, no anger expressed, no clearing of the air before the terrible accident happened, but only reticence and cover-up. It would have been better if both had been forthright.
The role is such a stumbling-block for ambitious actors. The play is a complex work, in which the main character fails to find a reassuring simplicity in himself. ‘Hamlet is only interesting,’ Peter Brook observed, ‘because he is not like anyone else, he is unique.’ He rages through every kind of style: obscene, cynical, choric, sublime; he passes from scorn and ironic incongruity to soul-searching meditation with effortless ease. For an actor, the best way to approach him is as a creative writer building a character. Interpretive ideas and critical analysis do not work. ‘The gaps,’ says Brook, ‘the delays in action Hamlet causes himself through his own primary need to find himself, not only to be tragically reflective, but he is a genius in a crisis.’ This summed up perfectly the problem Ian had, for it was he himself who was the genius in a crisis.
He had been along the right lines making Hamlet, or trying to make him, an image of modern youth, ‘shaggy hair, stark jersey, dirty boots, medallion chain, fringed jerkin’, but he fell short, as an actor, of showing the search and the need to find himself, or rather only showed this in impassioned fits and starts. The compensation was, as ever, his great gift of being magnetic on stage, and commanding and reassuring to the audience. Shakespeare made audiences secure in their contemplation of Hamlet with generosity and underlying stability; ultimately the effect of the tragedy affirmed life instead of denying it.
From poor reviews and an uncertain start he improved considerably, as certain of the best critics who saw it more than once (Irving Wardle, Benedict Nightingale, among others) faithfully recorded. As ever McKellen kept doggedly at it. J. C. Trewin wrote up Ian’s performance as one of the five-and-eighty Hamlets he chronicled in a book, and saw it when it returned to the Cambridge Theatre in Covent Garden. He said that ‘it was a little too soon for some hyperbole’ but that it had emotional certainty and naturalism, which sometimes could go too far (in his delivery of, to Ophelia, ‘You shouldn’t have believed me’). He applauded McKellen, especially during the Play Scene, for his splendid sustained fury and decision. ‘With, as ever, magnetism, theatricality and sheer energy to the fore.’ Thus McKellen finally fulfilled Shakespeare’s depiction of the melancholy prince.
The saint-like critic Trewin in his classic account was politely wary when old Hamlet’s voice rose ‘from the midst of a multiplicity of reflected ghosts’, while the device ‘which did not help Hamlet at all was his confinement in a straitjacket at “How all occasions.” Once, I understand, a modern director, doubtless looking forward to “Denmark’s a prison” (II.2), a phrase much quoted, made Hamlet act his early scenes wearing manacles.’
So much for ‘modern directors’, in other words directors with their own concept of Shakespeare. But, as McKellen got into his stride on tour and barnstorming took over, there were, after all, shades of Donald Wolfit.