‘A book where men may read strange things’
Lady Macbeth
Nine years after their success together in The Promise in 1967, Ian and Judi Dench had teamed up again in a revival of Too True to be Good, George Bernard Shaw’s political extravaganza. Dench played Sweety Simkins, the cockney nurse who masquerades as a French countess, although she held the view (not very popular at this time) that Shaw’s plays were more fun to be in than to watch. Ian, who played Popsy, the burglar who preaches social change, which came easy, defended Judi’s fully rounded performance against some criticisms. Trevor had wanted to do Macbeth with them and that was their condition of joining.
When Judi and Ian found themselves matched up as the Macbeths, as they started rehearsals at Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer of 1976, both had very different preconceptions of the approach they would make to the murderous duo. ‘I am always against those Lady Macbeths,’ said Judi, ‘who are strong and evil at the beginning. If they can do it on their own, why do they invoke the spirits to help them?’ and, ‘We try and tell a psychological story about people.’
Trevor saw the play as showing how the Macbeths were unfulfilled in marriage and the thought that this was the cause of her breakdown. Her cold ambition is what drives Macbeth and finally turns him against her. As Ian explained to John Barton:
I must believe in what I’m doing … I don’t believe in witches and I don’t believe in God, and Macbeth clearly believed in both these concepts. I’ve never killed a man … and I’ve never murdered … I’ve never been married, and so I have to imagine my way into all those aspects of his life by thinking of people I know, or it may be by thinking of a modern man, a contemporary whom I don’t know personally but who’s vaguely in Macbeth’s position.
So who would be the modern parallel this time? He tried to think of generals who had gone into politics. Then he thought it was something more because ‘Macbeth is the glory of the world, he’s the golden boy.’
Ian started again on his exercise of trying to match modern political figures to parts. Fortunately the need to explain, to tell rather than to show, often vanishes in the result as the acting instincts take over. This time his parallel was Muhammad Ali, the greatest athlete in the world. He asked himself what it would be like if Ali decided that he wanted to be President of the United States. John McEnroe also figured in this modern match-up game of Ian’s. The next idea, that of Nixon, was firmly flattened by Trevor Nunn: ‘No, no, he’s not Nixon, he’s Kennedy. It’s the golden couple, everyone loves the Macbeths.’ So the Kennedys it was. I am not sure if they or the American public would be flattered.
The RSC was in financial crisis, but Nunn managed, as he says, ‘to shoehorn [the production] past the board’ as a nocash Other Place studio production with a nil budget. Macbeth is a decidedly difficult play to stage successfully. ‘The writing is superbly dangerous, fast, lean, urgent, beautiful, it cuts like the sharpest, subtlest blade, it gets under your skin: it’s truly disturbing,’ says Antony Sher, and he, a later Macbeth, was to take much on board from Ian’s performance.
There had been many disastrous Macbeths. Derek Jacobi had fallen into the decidedly treacherous trap of attempting it for the RSC on a huge cumbersome set with cantilevered platforms unsuited for its twelve-week tour. This production, directed by Adrian Noble, had Jacobi wearing a sleep-suit costume which made him look like a moon astronaut. Peter O’Toole’s sounded the death knell of the prestigious Prospect Company, which was such a high point both in McKellen and Derek’s classic careers. After seventeen years’ absence from the stage, O’Toole had returned for the ‘Scottish play’ at the Old Vic, directed by Bryan Forbes. O’Toole called the play ‘Harry Lauder’. Before the curtain rose on the first night, Forbes found O’Toole in his dressing room naked except for the Gauloise between his lips: ‘Can’t wear them darling, they’re hopeless,’ he said of his costume, and went on in jogging bottoms and gym shoes.
Denis Quilley, when he played Macbeth, sensed the sexual arousal awoken at the thought of Banquo’s murder, which prompted him to put his hand down the front of Diana Rigg’s dress and fondle her nipple while saying, ‘Good things of day begin to droop and drowse.’
None of these Macbeths had quite matched the most famous mid-twentieth-century Macbeth disaster when Ralph Richardson, directed by his close friend John Gielgud, and playing opposite his passion, Margaret Leighton, was on the receiving end of Kenneth Tynan’s poisonous tongue. Tynan dismissed him as ‘a sad facsimile of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz‘. ‘Give me five pounds,’ Richardson had gone backstage saying to his colleagues: ‘If you don’t give me five pounds I’ll have it put about that you were in my Macbeth.‘
Undaunted by these failures, Ian was not even fazed. Trevor Nunn was not tempting providence when he opted to present his showpiece Macbeth on the miniature scale of the 160-seater Other Place at Stratford rather than in the cavernous main auditorium. Within whispering distance of the furthest-away audience, the ‘Poor Theatre’ approach had a chalk circle defining the playing area with a barrier of beer crates, outside of which the cast sat on stools ready to move inside and participate. At the back of the stage a wall of two sections of rustic wood had a narrow slit through which Macbeth left to murder Duncan, and later to charge after Macduff over whom he’d seemed to triumph. Then, as Benedict Nightingale described it, through it the ‘observing, calculating, remorseful and finally severed head’ of Macbeth was brought on stage by Macduff. A copper thunder-sheet hung down on the left side under the overlooking balcony. A props table supplied necessary accessories to the actors. The cast deliberately numbered thirteen. Trevor said in 2019 that he could still remember the heavy breathing near-silence of the cast around the perimeter of the stage before the play started. Ian began the action by striking the copper sheet three or four times, before launching into his darker longings, informing them with genial irony, even laughing bravado, and foaming rage during which, as he later said, ‘unwanted snot poured from my nose.’ Cottrell remembers with a shudder his delivery of ‘I ‘gin to be a-weary of the sun before’ when he commandingly gestured down to a naked light bulb.
It was the development of a hitherto undreamt-of sexual chemistry between Dench and McKellen upon which this production rested, and a delineation of a marriage in disintegration which Ian was able to achieve with an actress of equal emotional weight to his own. One could truly say that in Judi, Ian had met his mimetic acting double. McKellen showed Macbeth guided by his passion for his wife more than lust for power, while Judi’s Lady Macbeth lusted for the crown for her husband and not for herself. In the end, here were primarily two human beings in an intensely personal relationship. In this intimate locale you could see into their hearts as they concocted together the results of their shared egos, not of two monsters or friends but flesh-and-blood vulnerable victims of a downward spiral of temptation neither could resist. For Shakespeare, Macbeth was not an evil man but one who is drawn into evil, and deeply troubled by his actions and his awareness. The poignancy conveyed was well-nigh unbearable. A priest used to attend the production regularly and hold up a crucifix. Not to protect the audience or himself, but to protect the cast. He really thought they were liable to be assailed; evil was really present, Ian told Joy Leslie Gibson. Macbeth’s evil was of a weak, ambitious man, dominated by his wife. ‘I’ll go out on a limb and say,’ Ian is quoted, ‘without really being able to remember, that Macbeth lives entirely in the moment and what happens is happening to him as it happens.’ To say the whole exercise, played with a nightly audience of 160, was sombre, dark and full of fear, conveyed little of the impact. ‘She actually asks to be made cruel,’ commented Judi, acting against her instinctive good nature, while the production ratcheted up the terror by having no interval.
How did she do it? As Kenneth Branagh says of Dench in his memoir, Beginning, ‘She seemed to be able to embrace every emotion wholeheartedly. There is an amazing, childlike quality in her acting which allows her to cry or laugh with the abandon of a child. She assumes nothing, doubts herself constantly, but without indulgence.’ With Judi, McKellen could do something that was difficult for him: connect with the female side of his personality. It may be too, if I may speculate, their similar nonconformist upbringings (Judi boarded at the Quaker Mount School) contributed something to their rapport.
The demands on willpower and physical stamina were immense. McKellen did not spare himself, for on the Saturday before the press night of Macbeth, he did a matinee and evening of Romeo and Juliet, drove three-hundred-odd miles to Edinburgh, performed his new one-man show Words, Words, Words in St Cecilia’s Hall on Sunday evening, and returned to Stratford for Romeo on Monday night. He simply could not get enough of performing.
‘We see the gradual tearing away of Macbeth’s public mask until we reach the driven psychopath beneath,’ wrote Michael Billington in his Guardian review. ‘He marvellously achieves that blend of the practical and the introspective; and establishes with his wife a rich relationship, full of affection, desire, awe, inspiration and protectiveness,’ averred J. W. Lambert in the Sunday Times. Yet, and quite uniquely for him, it was a woman’s inspiration that drove him to it. ‘When I work with Judi, I really have to pull myself up to her level.’ Physically he was nearly a foot taller than she. The erotic charge was evident throughout each performance, especially when Judi kissed her husband on stage: ‘I have to go right up on tip-toes to reach him, right up to the toes of my boots.’ Sober Ian brought things down to earth, calling the experience ‘a corrective to my work’. ‘It’s so rare in the theatre,’ he said in Playing Shakespeare, ‘to get that intimacy in which the audience can catch the breath being inhaled before it is exhaled on a line and feel the excitement and certainty that what is happening is for real.’ Up on the stage at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre it may be live and it may be real, but it’s nothing like as real as in a 160-seat tin hut. According to Nunn, there was a technical advance in the intimate speaking of the verse in that season, which has not been spoken of before. Nunn held up Bob Peck, playing Aufidius in Coriolanus, as an example of this, and he had been listened to carefully and followed by Ian Hogg, who was Coriolanus, standing in the wings. This brought a new approach, which was to engage with the naturalistic thought pattern behind the lines. As Trevor expressed it, ‘everything was to do with the thought – and this of course was to break down the rigid adherence to mood music, to the form of the verse.’ Peck, who also played Macduff, commented on the animated and heated discussions between Trevor and Ian. These were ‘not unusual in rehearsal’, but Trevor persuaded Ian ‘to simple ideas … he tends to thrash around in rehearsal but Trevor anchored him down. Trevor’s very clever.’
Trevor’s contribution should not be underestimated. Peter Hall wrote in his diary, verifying what Nunn said about the change in the speaking of the verse:
Monday 26 September 1967
Off to the Warehouse for Trevor’s Macbeth production. It is magnificent: refreshing, invigorating, utterly clear and original; also the only Macbeth I’ve seen which works. And my admiration for the subtlety of the acting is unbounded. But by doing Shakespeare in a tiny room you do actually sidestep the main problem we moderns have with Shakespeare – rhetoric. We don’t like rhetoric, we mistrust it: our actors can’t create it, and our audiences don’t respond to it. So how on earth do you do a great deal of Shakespeare? It’s the problem that will often confront us at the Olivier and at the Barbican. The subtlety I saw in this Macbeth would have delighted the eyes of Leavis, but it was only possible because of the scale. In a large theatre something different would have happened – not intellect, but passion; not irony, but emotion. I am sure that historically the tendency in the seventies for the classical companies to work in tiny spaces will be seen as a cop-out. For all that, it was an evening which made me proud of my profession again, and full of admiration for Trevor. He is now a master. He has done the play three times before, and it has obsessed him for five years. This time he’s really made it. He is now one of the four or five directors whose work I would cross mountains to see.
The performance won Ian the Plays and Players’ London Theatre Critics Award for Best Actor of 1976. They transferred the production to the main house. In the Other Place the cast had shared a dressing room with a communal room with a curtain down the middle to separate the men from the women. When they moved to the main auditorium all, from Ian down, had their own single room. But when Trevor went round after the show to give notes individually to the cast he found they had all moved into the chorus room at the top of the theatre ‘and put up a curtain down the middle again!’ But here in the main auditorium it flopped: the atmosphere and contact with the small audiences were lost.
Nunn took it off after three weeks then moved it to London to the Donmar Warehouse, and later the Young Vic. With a variety of tricks, speed-runs and silly backstage pranks, such as tossing bras and pants over the partition in the scant dressing room, or even sticking pink luminous spots on themselves on stage to show the others without the audience noticing, the cast members revitalised the essential sexual thrust of the tragedy. One or two critics cavilled at the triumphant progress, notably Bernard Levin who found it ‘hideous and empty’, while B. A. Young called Ian’s speaking of the verse ‘eccentric beyond the bounds of acceptance’. Benedict Nightingale felt, he told me recently, that Judi’s performance did not entirely engage him, ‘in comparison with McKellen’s Macbeth, unable to cope with horrors she was incapable of seeing, she seemed, inevitably, somewhat superficial. The thing about Macbeth is that he has inner qualities she doesn’t have or doesn’t think she has and certainly disdains – and gets a horrible shock.’ He turns his back on her in the end, leaving her to weep alone.
In 1991 Trevor Nunn tried to sum up the production as a landmark, invoking the great god Larry, which pleased Ian, saying that Ian’s version ‘is referred to as the great Macbeth of the century. It’s a Waterloo of a play, which Olivier never pulled off. A text that most people think of as rhetorical, even overblown, was suddenly conversational, immediate, domestic. Because it was completely recognisable, it was harrowing and therefore unforgettable.’
When Antony Sher talked over Ian’s performance with Greg Doran, who was to direct him in the role, Doran remarked, ‘What Trevor did wasn’t just simplicity. It was inspired simplicity.’ To this Sher responded, ‘Hmm. [Greg was] absolutely right, but “inspired simplicity” is just code for “great art”. Aiming to do an inspirationally simple Macbeth is as difficult and dangerous – that word again – as setting out to paint a masterpiece.’
Billington’s final words on Ian’s Macbeth: ‘If this is not great acting, I don’t know what is.’
Ian now had fame, acclamation and rapturous reception in more than plenty, for he was utterly adulated and pursued by fans, one of whom was the newcomer Rupert Everett. In the hot summer of 1976 at Stratford he hung around the stage door with all the other ‘freaks’ and became an obsessive fan. He described how, when Ian appeared, the ladies, as he put it in his memoir Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, whined and snivelled, arms outstretched for the miracle of physical contact. ‘In one brief moment of climax, cards, cakes and keepsakes fell on him like a plague of locusts and then it was over.’
His own way was more menacing; positioning himself to full advantage, he stood back and stared, and never asked Ian to sign anything. He became something of a stalker, learning Ian’s every move by stealing his rehearsal schedule, waiting in the mornings to see him leave his house, but never speaking or intruding.
Six months later, once at drama school, Everett got a job at the Donmar when Macbeth transferred there. As a ticket-tearer, he would scold latecomers until the house manager told him the ‘leading actor’ complained. He played the voyeur ‘through the crack in those felt curtains, like an imprisoned wife in purdah, making eyes at Ian on the stage as his clothes were torn from him by the little witches in their dirty lace mittens’. He wormed his way into McKellen’s dressing room, returning Judi Dench’s little voodoo dolls after her mad scene, but managing ‘to look sultry as I passed through the men’s dressing room where Ian sat half-naked and smoking in front of the mirror’. The stalker was in the house!
McKellen was flattered, even complicit. Everett’s pick-up tactic worked, because soon he was on the back of Ian’s scooter for a tête-à-tête in Camberwell, exulting in his triumph over another persistent fan, a tall, slightly hunched girl with pebble glasses, a high forehead and long scarves. He would never forget ‘her utter disbelief’ as he ‘strapped on Ian’s spare helmet’, a tartan Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, and ‘put my hands around his waist before speeding off. You could have knocked her over with a feather.’
They continued to see one another, and it led to more than just that. The climax of Everett’s fan-dangling came over a year later when he was round at Ian’s home drinking wine and sorting out make-up. Drunkenly they made themselves up. Everett painted on a Ziggy Stardust look, and McKellen a chalk-white geisha, before both sprayed on fixative. Ian suggested they play rock-stars and fans, so Rupert, standing on the sofa, plucked a string-less guitar over Ian on the floor writhing and screaming.
This cameo of an off-duty Macbeth, which Everett described in July 2012, had more in it than was shown in his memoir, and ended with Rupert uttering ‘Good evening, Camberwell,’ and bursting into tears. Later, on a more serious note, he was to confess that his ‘liaisons ranged from Paula Yates to Ian McKellen,’ so there must have been much more to the off-stage romping with Macbeth. In 2013 Everett said specifically, ‘I did sleep with Ian McKellen. I loved stalking. Now it’s illegal, such a shame. Such fun!’ Everett liked danger: ‘Everyone at the time lived on a knife edge … in the shadow of AIDS. You went to lunch with family friends and would see someone taking your plate and washing it separately.’
To like danger, with the ghost of the dead father in the background: is this yet another strand of the McKellen mystery?