Barton had now left academia and King’s, Cambridge, for a fully blown, if slightly tempestuous and wayward, professional career. He had collaborated magnificently as director and adapter with Peter Hall and Frank Evans in the landmark Wars of the Roses of 1961–3. Under Hall’s wing he had begun directing at Stratford, notably with Peter O’Toole and Peggy Ashcroft in The Taming of the Shrew. For conflicting, temperamental reasons he and O’Toole had fallen out and this had been a disaster. Other productions had followed and the general opinion in the profession was that you either liked and got on with Barton and his way – a somewhat dictatorial and academic one – of controlling his cast, or you did not.
McKellen after his one-man dominance and exercise of responsibility in the Actors’ Company, in 1974 joined the RSC, his former bête noir. Chastened perhaps, as if returning to university, he adopted the formal actor-formative methods using movement and voice coaches, that Nunn had implemented in turning the RSC into something of a theatrical academy to bring continuity, trust, stability and development to his hand-chosen few. The company was half the size of the one Peter Hall had run. McKellen was ready and eager for such transformation – to submit to tutelage and to renounce leadership in the administrative sense, as long as he had the big roles. He responded to this almost puritanical, Leavisite takeover of his life, concentrating on a close and meticulous attention to the meaning of text and its moral value (Nunn had been a student of F. R. Leavis at Downing College).
The directors at the top included Terry Hands with Barton and Nunn, and Cecily Berry, the outstanding voice coach, who with healing as well as inspirational guidance, directed a complete restringing and retuning of Ian’s vocal propensity. Trevor worked in a very intimate way, working out relationships between characters, looking for the truth. Terry was interested in the epic scale of plays. John Barton was into the form of the language. ‘Head boys direct,’ Barton once told me, and he had been head boy at Eton, while Ian filled the same role at Bolton Grammar. What would happen now? Would Ian submit, or would he seek control, to take over the levers, and want to inject and fill each production with every new idea or intuition he had, with razor-blade chewing Barton in the chair?
Surrender and acceptance was the new model. Glenda Jackson was also in this company. Submission was the name of the game, for ‘we all lie out on our backs with our eyes closed and do Cecily’s breathing techniques, starting by breathing on a vowel and building up. She then comes around and when she lifts up one of your arms, totally limp, suddenly you know all about relaxation. It’s all about conserving breath and energy.’ Submission was not a game Glenda could play for long.
Ian was now a yogi on a new learning curve. He declared that this was a limited company ‘in which a group of people all worked … It’s hierarchical, that’s its structure.’ Sexual anxiety and adventure, in the form of the highly romantic affair with Gary Bond, was over; the inseparable-couple-bond with Brodie broken for ever, and here now, without the responsibility of leading the company, Ian felt himself back in the place he loved as his home, the theatre, in an inclusive family. Trevor (who had something of a reputation as an elusive Pimpernel) was surprisingly present in the green room talking to people. Gone for the time being was that complaint that you could never find him; as Kenneth Branagh said in his autobiography, he would throw his arms round you and hug you – ‘I had been enveloped in Trevor’s hair and beard and deafeningly loud in my right ear was an enormous vowel sound’ (this was called ‘being Trev’ed’) – and then disappear.
Caryl Brahms, Ned Sherrin’s collaborator and an incisive commentator, wrote an extraordinary foreshadowing of Ian’s future role of Gandalf: ‘His face, in no way arrestingly handsome, is indeed his fortune, in that the blob nose and the un-arresting features are splendid for disguise and are not forever pulling one back from his characterisations to his own personality. His voice is strange, a little disturbing. It seems to come from a cranny high in the back of his throat.’
But it was also a slightly eerie premonition of the future that he was to make his RSC debut with Marlowe’s master magician.
McKellen now humbly admitted that he felt it was very difficult to be objective about his own work. Perhaps the prestige of the RSC, once held at arm’s length, now seemed more hospitable and on a scale he could respond to. He looked to Barton’s restraining hand in Doctor Faustus. He claimed he often asked directors, lest they should feel inhibited as some did, not to hesitate to be very basic in their criticism. He wanted to work with Barton and Ron Eyre (for the next RSC production) as they were both very gentle and sympathetic people, but at the same time they were tough enough, and cared enough about their own work and the plays they were doing, to say, ‘That won’t do’. They would always be pushing him further.
It is hard to recognise the more dictatorial John Barton in this. The result in Doctor Faustus was not altogether successful, because in this combination of both great Cambridge minds, something of the sexual, sensual side of the text was lost. Gone was that rapid sensual quality McKellen had shown in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, while somehow the whole production took place in the head, and the play remained as much an enigma as before. The text, much of it not written by Marlowe, is ‘calculatedly ambivalent’, as the Cambridge literary academic Anne Barton, then John’s wife, wrote in the programme, in addition to Marlowe’s atheistic, homosexual and political contradictions. In fact, one seemed confronted with two enigmas, first the play itself, with all its complexities, and its episodic and largely irrelevant comic scenes, which Barton omitted. Then there was the enigma of what Barton did with it in performance, not primarily in the way he reshaped it, but more in his view of the play as it came through in McKellen’s interpretation.
Barton used life-size Japanese Bunraku puppets for the parade of Deadly Sins, Helen of Troy, and the miniature Good and Bad Angels. He tinkered with the text to make Doctor Faustus more uniform and give it the single setting of Faustus’s study. He added lines from the English Faust-Book to chronicle missing links in the narrative. He provided one long, lively scene of his own from a few lines in the original, when the Duchess of Vanholt indulges in bawdy horseplay with Faustus under her husband’s nose. As the Duchess was exuberantly played by an actual actress (Jean Gilpin) not a puppet, the relief and titillation was considerable!
The character of Faustus, like Edward II, is not a very individual creation. Perhaps his incompleteness, deliberate in Marlowe’s version, instead of tantalising the audience, in Barton’s version made it confront inadequacies that might otherwise have passed unnoticed. The result was that by putting all the attention on to Faustus, and in not allowing his audience to be distracted from him, Barton gave McKellen an impossible task.
He acquitted himself badly. In the early part when Faustus’s curiosity is seen to consume him, he leapt about the set in a highly unrealistic manner, contorting his frame, introducing strange throbbing inflections into his voice. It was highly mannered work, absolutely running counter to the meticulous set detail, the dozen or so different kinds of chairs assembled on every level in every alcove of the vaulted study; it also, more importantly, ran counter to Emrys James’s measured and demurely precise Mephistopheles.
Although his delivery of some of the finer verse was cunningly modulated, McKellen’s performance became full of tormented mannerism, summoned possibly to sustain him through the exacting task Barton had set him. The slower sections, when Faust is ageing, registered more convincingly than the rest, but this was far from being one of McKellen’s best performances. Hobson compared McKellen unfavourably with Emrys James’s quiet Mephistopheles. The introspective attitude the puppets established did not help McKellen either.
And no less beaten backwards and forwards from two sides of the critical court were the other main roles Ian played in this London RSC season at the Aldwych, all of which were bursting with restless energy and sometimes untempered enthusiasm. His Marquis in Frank Wedekind’s The Marquis of Keith was, for instance, imbued for B. A. Young ‘with something of Hitler’, which may be going a bit too far, while his Bastard in Barton’s production of King John again evoked split critical views: for Michael Coveney it was ‘strikingly heroic’ while for Irving Wardle he was just a ‘Pistol-like bumpkin’ whose weird reading of the part ‘one must ascribe to the director’.
Equally the lead role of Colin in David Rudkin’s Ashes, a nakedly personal account of an infertile couple, had for Hobson an unacceptably muddled accent (of Belfast, Birmingham and Lancashire) and a ‘fearful complacency’ to a character’s sexual discontent, ‘determined to be disappointed’. Might there have been here something personal in this projection of the role in McKellen’s apparently chaste and self-imposed continence during this period?
Ian’s enthusiasm about sticking with the RSC extended into 1975 when he wrote to Nunn, strongly desiring to continue at Stratford in the 1976–7 season. His condition was, Nunn told me in 2019, that he should play Macbeth. It did not augur well for his first assignment, that of Romeo (and then Leontes in The Winter’s Tale), but the perk here, and the excitement, was that he was to be working directly with Trevor, who perhaps had something of a desire to straighten out and redeem some aspects of those previous performances. After Romeo, but only after it, would he scale the greatest height he had reached so far.
‘How do you manage to look so young?’ a fan asked Ian, aged thirty-four, about to embark on Romeo, the star-crossed lover. ‘It’s the magic of theatre,’ he replied, ‘something always takes over.’ This was disingenuous because McKellen worked hard at everything, and in Romeo’s case it was youth he sought to capture. He told Benedict Nightingale, who met him walking one day on the Embankment below St George’s, Pimlico, that you needed to be a mature age to play Romeo properly (in contrast to, ‘You needed to be young to play Hamlet’). Nightingale noticed how disconsolate his mood seemed, as if very lonely. Back with Trevor, as at Cambridge, he re-awoke the influence of Dadie Rylands, who had instilled in him the most scrupulous attention to the classic texts, releasing them from the straitjackets of habit and convention. Perhaps also closer to the mind and being of Shakespeare than any other academic or literary figure of the day, ‘Dadie’ remained for Ian an inner driver of the essence of Shakespeare. In the plays about great lovers, Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet, there are few opportunities for the actual physical and sexual demonstration of love. Romeo is a part of sexual longing, conveyed aurally, and clearly this was going to be a big plus in McKellen’s performance, as equally his sense of grief over Juliet’s death. As Ian put it, ‘Romeo’s mad – he’s a suicide case – he can’t reconcile the enormity of love with the business of having breakfast and being nice to people.’
Some felt he over-egged the teenage rapture, the puny and cadaverous figure he cuts in Verona’s brawling society, but underneath the fever and uncertainty he projected in the role, the commanding actor would always be there, as attested by Francesca Annis, who as Juliet felt that the marvellous quality he had was his enormous confidence, and that on stage you ‘would feel you are not alone. He would be in control if anything went wrong.’ At the end he gathered Juliet when believing she is dead and did a controlled dance with her body round the stage until he slowly collapsed.
One night something did go seriously wrong, during the balcony scene, for after the farewell words of behaving like the winged messenger of Heaven, sailing ‘upon the bosom of the air’, as he left Juliet he slipped on a wooden rung and dived fifteen feet to the stage floor. Ian took the fall in good spirits, and, not so badly hurt, appeared smiling at the curtain call holding up the offending ladder rung. But later he did express a wish to abolish the balcony altogether, although priding himself that he and Francesca planned and achieved twenty-seven laughs in the scene. One came from an explicit orgasmic gesture in ‘Thus with a kiss I die!’ – they cut this as it caused embarrassed laughter. Later he dismissed his whole performance as a failure saying, ‘I came to it too late.’ Perhaps Sheridan Morley’s comment had stuck: ‘the two lovers [are] not only star-crossed but visibly into their thirties which makes me wonder during their duller moments why they aren’t looking forward or worrying about their children’s education.’
But once again it gripped audiences everywhere when so often this play can be dull. Nunn loved his exuberance and youthfulness. While Tyrone Guthrie had commented, ‘You cannot act what is not in your physical nature,’ this is not entirely accurate. The capacity to love was there, but he did not trust it, and was frightened to show it, while otherwise in acting he showed his true feelings.
He, Nunn and Annis, in spite of the barbed criticism, brought off Romeo and Juliet and prolonged its life in London at the Aldwych. Not so Ian’s Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, who was a victim of directional confusion, with Nunn doing the opening part of Leontes’ torture and jealousy at court, Barton in control of the rustic Bohemia, and Barry Kyle tying up the loose ends at the close of play. It simply did not work. Ian remained, it was said, ‘unmutilated’ by the internal laceration of the play’s abdomen, bowels and groin. The Winter’s Tale did not stay the course and was dropped from the repertoire. Ian had no great fondness either for playing in Stratford’s large auditorium.
He loved the subsequent tour of the next season as Andrei in Three Sisters with Ted Petherbridge as Vershinin, and Sir Toby in Twelfth Night, and joined with huge relish in every side of Nunn’s innovative small RSC touring company, pitching in with building and bolting a portable high-raised platform, and then drumming up support for student workshops. Nunn had rejected the idea of the grander, non-stop tours in different places with little contact with audiences. This company was nearer the Actors’ Company formula and Ian masterminded it as they worked more as a collective (Timothy Spall took over as Andrei). Trevor called the venture one of the best experiences of his life. ‘Ian’s always with us at the get-in,’ explained the tour’s lighting designer. ‘He co-opted a three-boy team of helpers who followed him up and down the portable scaffolding of the lighting towers, carrying cables, connecting point sockets, and becoming totally involved in the production.’
Here another side of the indefatigable loner emerged in Sheffield, playing for the first time the off-stage role of roving ambassador for his live theatre family, gathering plaudits for his flawless and untiring connection with every aspect of the work. The perfectionist at heart, he still had that fire and commitment shown at Cambridge, when amateur casts would stay up all night lighting and staging the plays. Indubitably it was in the work where he had found his soul and if he had stolen fire from heaven like the mythical Prometheus, it was to keep theatre alive and aflame. At the heart of it, too, was the roving gift he had so admired as a boy in the gypsies of the Bolton fairground, always moving on, always travelling life’s highway with a song and a smile.