‘You learn through a theatre company that mutual dependence leads to a faith in the human spirit which is very sure’
Trevor Nunn
Kenneth Branagh remembers a joke he’d heard in relation to McKellen and the Actors’ Company.
‘Isn’t it marvellous about Ian McKellen and the Actors’ Company. This week he’s playing Hamlet, and last week he was in something where he just played the footman.’
‘What was the play called?’
‘The Footman.’
Edward Petherbridge, the new visitor to McKellen’s dressing room in the Cambridge Theatre after a Hamlet performance in September 1971, had much in common with Ian. Both were socialist pacifists with a belief in equality, while the visitor, when aged nineteen, had served three months in Wormwood Scrubs for his refusal to join up for National Service. Both had lost mothers at early ages, both were Northerners from industrial towns who shed their accents; both had been in Olivier’s National Theatre company in the early days, although McKellen, after a short spell, had left. Petherbridge had stayed on at the National and played Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s first successful stage play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but in spite of this had grown tired of it for the same reasons that Ian had left, namely there were too many young contenders for leading roles.
Ian told Edward he was going to Sheffield to help inaugurate the new Crucible Theatre, where he would play the old actor in Chekhov’s virtual monologue, Swansong, with David William to direct. Later the same night, at 1 a.m., Edward telephoned Ian to ask if he could join him to play the tiny supporting part of Nikita, the old prompter. This flattered Ian no end: the actor who created Guildenstern in Stoppard’s play at the National offering to walk-on at Sheffield? It was like, thought Ian, a champion golfer offering to caddy.
This was how McKellen’s next venture, forming the Actors’ Company jointly with Petherbridge, came into being. Two months later the potential founding members, including Petherbridge, Eileen Atkins and Robert Eddison, met at Ian’s house in Camberwell. The principle behind it was a company of equals with equal pay and billing for all, sharing leading roles as well as smaller ones. Richard Cottrell outlined the concept: each member should have a leading part, a supporting part and a small part, while anybody had the right to drop out if they had an outside project they wanted to do instead, and with no bad feeling. Later, when they were under way, they printed a manifesto in their programmes with these principles: ‘The Actors’ Company is a group of experienced actors and actresses who have combined to play both leading and supporting roles in their own Company. Through mutual discussion they have made all artistic decisions concerning plays, directors and casts. Their aim has been to produce a company of equals.’
At this first meeting of the twelve, Eileen Atkins had to drop out because she was committed to plays in London and New York. Ian felt they were all rather proud and surprised at their own daring. The meeting swung between seriousness and hilarity with Ian ‘vaguely’ and ‘apprehensively’ in the chair. The democratic first aim was that while actors are usually the last to be considered or employed, they would now take control of planning up to the time of starting rehearsals, they would choose the plays and invite the directors they wanted to direct. The second aim was ‘equality’ as ‘all commercial theatre in Britain and, whatever their intentions, subsidised companies, rely on a pyramidal hierarchy with the star at the top.’
The auspices were good, and it was to be a testing enterprise to show how the principles would work. According to Ian in the company manifesto, to be chosen ‘by other actors whose talent and ability one admires, is about the greatest compliment one can be paid. It is an inspiration – and a responsibility – which rarely comes the way of an actor in Britain. I feel that out of this something exciting should be produced for the audience to enjoy.’ So here we have an early taste of Ian the proselytiser, the politician with a cause. For McKellen the Actors’ Company would be first and foremost a test of how much he could live up to, and observe the principles of, equality – living and sharing roles and wages of £50 a week, as well as the billing. Finally, they needed sixteen founding members, to finalise the plays: Caroline Blakiston, Richard Cottrell, Marian Diamond, Robert Eddison, Robin Ellis, Tenniel Evans, Felicity Kendal, Matthew Long, Edward Petherbridge, Moira Redmond, Sheila Reid, Jack Shepherd, Ronnie Stevens and John Tordoff.
At first they had a great run of luck because Richard Cottrell, who had left Prospect to run the Cambridge Theatre Company based in the Arts Theatre, wholeheartedly supported the venture and suggested twenty-four possible plays. They dutifully read these and whittled them down to three. Ian kept a diary, recording that everything Cottrell had promised went on to happen. They accepted the £50 salary, much less than any of them could expect were they working in London or on television. The three plays they decided on were all on Cottrell’s list of suggestions. ‘No: it wasn’t that he pushed us around, then or later; rather that he sympathised with what we wanted to do and then worked out how he might provide it,’ said Margery Mason.
At Cottrell’s flat in Soho they agreed to rehearse two plays concurrently, the third at Edinburgh during the day and during a three-week tour before joining it to the others in a six-week repertoire at Cambridge. ‘… We are poaching Royal and National territory.’ Ah well! Ian’s formidable competitive juices were roused. Democracies with workers’ control ‘are always more exhausting’, said Cottrell. Everything took time to decide. ‘I was touched when I was asked to join the company,’ said Robert Eddison. ‘I was so much older than all the others. But it was all the greatest fun, huge fun, though I did find the meetings endless and ghastly. I never knew what to say.’
Meantime, in a rather lean year for Ian’s earnings – 1972 was one of the few times he visited the Labour Exchange – he took on, funded generously by Eddie Kulukundis, a musical based on Henry V with the appalling title of Hank Cinq. In the absence of him singing in it, he would direct. But this came to naught and directing two other West End revivals did nothing to entice him to follow the directorial paths of Gielgud and Olivier. Yet again these displays, although not especially rewarded critically, attest to the superhuman energy of the man, sometimes bordering on monomania: at the time he was one hundred per cent involved in three contemporary plays in the provinces, formulating and executing plans for the Actors’ Company, as well, in typical Ian style, as proselytising the press on the company’s behalf. The enemy in the good old Quaker, non-conformist family tradition, was ‘them’ – in this case the out-of-touch RSC and National, the star system of the West End, and so on. But how much actual equality was there between him and the rest of the Actors’ Company, and was it an illusion?
They had their first three plays. First Richard Cottrell’s adaptation of Feydeau’s farce Le Dindon with the English title of Ruling the Roost; they coupled this with Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, irresistibly combining infidelity, bourgeois French farce, and chiaroscuro Italian passion. The third choice was Iris Murdoch’s new play The Three Arrows, set in medieval Japan. Petherbridge, who had been due to play Hamlet at The Mermaid, dropped this, and was free to take part; Felicity Kendal was voted to play Annabella the Whore. Ian valiantly went on propounding the equality.
I was ‘offered’ Giovanni, Ford’s hero, and Victor, Feydeau’s pageboy. After a year playing yet another Jacobean neurotic (i.e. Hamlet) I should have preferred my bigger part in the farce; but by now I was really convinced that the idea of the company means as much to me (and indeed to my career) as the parts I should play. Petherbridge felt the same and abandoned his initial indifference to Soranzo in ‘Tis Pity. Robert Eddison accepted two parts with an impressive but limited impact, with the ‘pious hope’ of an equally good part in the third play – whatever that would be.
Stars in disguise surely!
Some members of the company, almost at once, noticed the head-boy leadership quality of McKellen becoming indispensable, in spite of his wishing otherwise. Quite a lot of psychologists, historians and commentators of all kinds, from Aristotle (‘The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal’) to George Orwell, have said equality is something of a mirage. Ian had to act equal the best he could, and naturally treated everyone as his peer. With his natural kindness and easy disposition this was not a problem. As everyone struggled to meet their commitments outside and within the company, and personal clashes sometimes arose as they battled to keep it democratic, Ian was determined not to be seen as the star, and would never, as Margery Mason, a former Communist Party member, reported, monopolise the meetings.
When it came to casting the Murdoch play, the chosen director, Noël Willman, gave the committee his opinion that there were three actors up to the demands of the lead role of Yoremitsu. These dominated more than in any other play in the repertoire. They left the choice to those ‘who don’t already have a smashing part’. In a roundabout way Ian was saying that he should get the part, and as Mason commented, ‘Though no one was supposed to have more than one leading part, Ian managed to get the lead in two of them! He has great powers of leadership!’
In terms of the company the ‘star’ of this first season was understandably John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. I was at the Edinburgh opening. The revelation for me was that before seeing it, I had thought the incestuous passion of Giovanni and Annabella hardly rose above purely sensual infatuation. This production showed that there was far more scope in their passion, far more possibility for ambiguity and affinity of temperament between the pair, than I had supposed.
The company had set out to make it a splendid and psychologically complex work, taut in plot, entirely gripping from the first moment to the last of its three-and-a-half hours. David Giles, the director, set it in a Mazzinian Parma, and Kenneth Mellor’s two-level set provided an inner chamber for the incestuous love scenes, while a murky colonnaded walk allowed for the action to flow over with ease. The accompanying business was for the most part concerned with refreshment of one kind or another and was an ideal match for the often acid, often very sharp, quality of Ford’s verse. For instance, Giovanni clutched a half-filled bottle of claret from which he took a defiant swig during Annabella’s marriage to Soranzo. The absorbing use of hats and a host of other excellent small touches, like Bergetto’s return to retrieve his glove, aided the natural progress of each scene. There was one small excess when Bergetto carelessly stuffed an ice cream in his uncle Ronaldo’s face.
The first of the stunning climaxes was Hippolita’s death, engineered by the fascinating Vasques. T. S. Eliot wrote of this that Hippolita’s sub-plot was ‘tedious’, her death ‘superfluous’. If he had seen this production he would have changed his mind, especially in the way that Ian’s Giovanni used the moment to foreshadow his own end. In the space where Hippolita has died, heaping her curses on the fatal marriage, at the end of the act alone he curls up, aping her demise.
The grisly end, when Giovanni appears with Annabella’s heart on the point of his dagger, could have been laughable, or could have been obscene. As played by Ian, it was purely horrifying, leaving a haunting and terrible image. His performance rose to triumphant self-extinction, showing he found its main drive not so much in lust, but a dreadful deformed kind of narcissism which lay at the very heart of Giovanni’s incest. But he succeeded also in showing the purity and innocence of the passion.
‘Repugnant!’ cries Vasques, who Jack Shepherd played with a seedy, alienated honesty, while as Annabella, Felicity Kendal defiantly emphasised the genuineness of her repentance, overheard by as good and sensitive a friar (Robert Eddison) as one might hope for. Edward Petherbridge’s Soranzo was an impeccably exact study of nobility excited to revenge: it afforded a fine contrast to Giovanni.
Unmistakably Ian was again back on course to being, as Hobson pronounced magisterially, ‘the most exciting as well as the greatest of our young actors’. A definitive production, then, but paradoxically hardly vindicating the principle of equality.
The director Ronald Eyre (not to be confused with Richard) reminisces about the company’s next production, the Feydeau play. It took him back to when he was working for the RSC, and they thought that they should make their leading players play walk-ons as well. They asked Judi Dench to play a maid in Much Ado About Nothing and she went to great lengths to disguise herself, found a dark wig, put freckles on. She did not want people to recognise her and say, ‘That’s Judi Dench’, and so upset the balance of the scene. ‘Now,’ said Eyre, ‘you’d never get Ian to do anything like that. He would always want to be recognised. You were only too aware that it was McKellen playing the footman.’ Not again, please!
If McKellen had revealed something deep about his character and ego in this first Actors’ Company season, it was undeniable that he was established as the great actor. This was never to change. But he himself was constantly seeking to improve, seeking to become the best of what he could be. Equality with others could never wholly satisfy him. McKellen would never tire, never give up; and his command of the stage and audience, which was his great gift and the thing that drew audiences, backers and fans, would never fade or diminish over time. He created, even in the most evil and despicable characters such as Giovanni, an absolute reassurance and tranquillity.
The second season of the Actors’ Company in 1972–3 in Edinburgh, London and the Brooklyn Academy, New York, with much of the same high-plateau performance, received similar kinds of rapturous appreciation and critical stricture. Ian made a big hit in the New York plays as Michael, the lead in Chekhov’s The Wood Demon, exploiting rather than indulging his emotionalism, but never allowing the fits of the doctor’s petulance to get out of control: ‘heady, lyrical acting’, wrote John Peter from New York, while his Footman (!) in Congreve’s The Way of the World won raptures for his comic inventiveness in delivering just four lines.
He shocked everyone when playing Edgar, with Robert Eddison playing Lear, by taking off his clothes in the ‘Mad Tom’ scenes. The legendary critic Clive Barnes wrote of this New York appearance, while admitting the sensational unity of the company (their costumes had not arrived so they had to perform in modern dress), that the production was stuffed with good, unobtrusive performances – but for Ian McKellen: ‘… admittedly playing Edgar as if it were a star role, but this is the special genius of Mr McKellen’s acting. He has a natural blaze to him that no amount of democracy can douse. His Edgar is deeply felt and beautifully presented. He is that rare bird, an intellectual actor with incandescence, so not only does he know what to do, he also seems to know why he is doing it.’
This review sums up the whole paradox of the Actors’ Company’s excellent two years of life. Inevitably Ian gravitated back to playing leading roles, in which he won the plaudits. McKellen’s Prince Yoremitsu in The Three Arrows was described by Billington as ‘some jet-black stallion beating against the sides of a corral and his voice sings agony out of the least expected phrases.’
Those who believe passionately in equality are often loath to admit the paradoxical nature of human life and art. Ian refused to rejoin the National in 1972 to play leads in The Bacchae and Molière’s The Misanthrope, the latter being, I believe, a sad omission for his public. It is impossible to imagine a greater potential exponent of Molière’s great comic hypocrites – Alceste, Harpagon, Tartuffe – with the opportunities to act out and enlarge their often monstrous demonstration of double standards and folly.
But now Trevor Nunn, with yet again the Cambridge connection clicking in, was offering a whole raft of glittering roles to take Ian through right to the end of the 1970s. He had wanted him in the company ever since seeing him and Judi Dench together in The Promise and Ian alone in The Wood Demon. ‘There isn’t a whiff of experimental theatre or radicalism about the idea,’ Ian had said at the beginning of this new venture, ‘and as all those involved are experienced, even well-established performers, it isn’t at all conceived along the lines of a political co-operative … I always feel that in every field of entertainment, the actor knows best – perhaps about everything except his own performance.’ Yet McKellen, inevitably monarch of all he surveyed, even a company of ‘equal actors’, was, according to Frank Middlemass as he told Mark Barratt, ‘the only one who really knew what he was doing. He’s got the sort of brain that can cope. I think most actors are too volatile. They’re creatures of emotion. And you needed a business brain as well for the Actors’ Company.’
Not only, then, was it a question, in Orwellian terms, of all animals being equal, and some animals more equal than others, it was also the eternal reality, perhaps, that nature abhors a vacuum. What greater challenge was there ever likely to be than a company of actors who had joined for their passionate belief in equality? What better microcosm could there be of today’s political macrocosm than paying lip service to a fair and idealistic equality being a possible choice, that you could put to the vote, while actually this was impractical in reality? If Ian had pursued equality, then perhaps he should have ruled himself out of the voting that chose him to play Prince Yoremitsu.
But it was not to go on – for there was the question of funding, and who would back the venture? For the confidence of the Arts Council, they had to have stars. As the Actors’ Company manager William MacDonald summed up, there were too many egos in the cauldron. Everyone talked about abandoning the star system, but everyone was a star or a potential star. People came to see the stars – McKellen and Petherbridge – so ‘in a way we were obliged to pander to the star system.’ Yet the ‘excitement, the acclaim, the queues – it was marvellous’.
Later Peter Hall was to comment to Vanity Fair, and after there had been some talk of Ian taking over the National Theatre, for which he had declined to put himself forward: ‘He loves to hide behind the will of the group, when in fact it is his will … I don’t think he enjoys the inevitable unpopularity that comes with leadership.’