‘I think, as Ian’s boyfriend, I was very much in his shadow’
Sean Mathias
Sean Mathias and McKellen met at a party after the show in 1978 in Edinburgh where Sean was performing in the National Youth Theatre. Ian was playing at the Festival on the RSC small company tour. He was thirty-nine, on the cusp of forty. Tipped to be the greatest actor of his age ten years earlier, still single and very much on his own, he might be forgiven for a rush of blood to the head when he spotted this Adonis figure, with flowing golden hair, with altogether the manner and personality of a 1970s rock star, and an easy, outgoing charm. But there was an apparent contrariness or rebellious streak too, which must have struck home to Ian’s off-beat personality, an eclecticism of appearance which showed in the glasses with thick black rims like Michael Caine’s in The Ipcress File.
Sean was twenty-two, and an actor at the time, although he dreamt of fame as a playwright and director. He was born in Sketty, the smart area of Swansea. The buzz for him was of danger, as he said to Andy Lavender of The Times: ‘I like the high wire.’ It was as if he was proclaiming to the world, ‘I’m up for anything.’ Little surprise then, that Ian and he fell straight into bed. Ian must have enjoyed the feeling he was dangerous, both in creative work and in his private life. As Richard Eyre commented later when they rehearsed Richard III, ‘He likes the smell of napalm in the morning!’ Trevor Nunn, too, when I met him in 2018, emphasised Ian’s taste for danger. There had been some lonely years on his own since he had left Brodie and moved on from the affair with Gary Bond.
Keeping apart from the rest of the RSC company, Ian stayed in a large Edinburgh mansion rented by John Drummond, that year’s festival director, with other female and male guests of Drummond. Mathias was appearing on the fringe, Ian was in Three Sisters. ‘Could I bring a friend?’ Ian asked Drummond. Straight away he and Mathias were sharing a bedroom. For all Sean’s charm and attraction, he did not make a hugely favourable impression on Ian’s friends. He was tolerated and welcomed everywhere with Ian, for Ian’s sake. Ian meanwhile wanted his privacy respected. His attitude, as stated on his website, is, ‘I think it’s one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It’s another to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It’s not that they [my significant others] don’t want to be identified as gay, but that they don’t want to be identified as … with me.’
But wait a minute. Sean did not mind at all being identified with Ian. Would he be a good match for the restless, even pernickety, Ian? Sean, who has always been open and outspoken, even rude, described them as different people. ‘Ian’s more of an academic, and I’m more of a maverick. We approach things in different ways … He would have to know all the reasons for doing something. I can go along with something more abstract.’ More appositely, Ian had the borough engineer mind of his father: he always weighed things out and measured everything carefully into pros and cons.
The long-standing older friends of Ian such as Drummond and Roger Hammond, who went back to his Cambridge days, felt protective of Ian. But the mutually shared egotism was initially productive to both parties, at least in that first full flush of sexual exploration and contentment, while Sean now had a much older guide, mentor, sponsor and protector. It was not a match made in heaven, but more on a terrestrial plane, for even on a day-to-day basis there would seem to be disputes.
Sean and Ian now engaged in what he called a ‘quasi-marriage’, though Ian remained ‘very suspicious of the institution’. In spite of their differences, or perhaps because of their differences, there is no doubt Sean made Ian happy in a way partners in a gay relationship were still not supposed to be happy – judging by what Sean says later in recounting the effect on Billie, his mother. It took Sean some time into his relationship with Ian, eight years in fact, to tell his mother that they had been living together. Even though they were seen on trips abroad, still Billie did not know they were lovers, or that Sean was gay. The immediate catalyst was that a book of his was about to be published, and the publicity about the book would make it clear that he was a gay man. Sean went over to see her and tell her. He thought that she must have already guessed, because he had been living with Ian for all that time. ‘People may know certain things but don’t always want to address them explicitly.’
Her response was so cold that he was convinced she had not known. It was an uncomfortable weekend, for they had been so close, and now were upset and awkward with each other. He remembered his mother saying something about grandchildren, which struck him as absurd because she already had grandchildren. She tried to understand, but ‘it is a generational thing, in that my mother grew up at a time when gay men were supposed to live very unhappy lives, and Billie wanted me to be happy – so it was hard for her.’
Gradually over months and years, it got much, much better and she became reconciled to it. ‘At first I would say, yes, there is someone in my life and I am happy – I am happiest in a relationship – but Billie maybe didn’t want to talk about it.’ In later years relations were to improve: ‘Billie and Ian get on very well these days, much better than when Ian and I were together,’ Sean told the Mail on Sunday much later, after the end of their relationship.
A year or so after he had met Sean, after the speed and the euphoria of their affair had worn off a little, Ian was still the good looking, decent, nice boy from Bolton, as Margaret Drabble described him at Cambridge: self-effacing and ruminative, very thoughtful. But, like the iceberg, this was the public tip of the personality. Something had remained unresolved. Sharp-eyed Caryl Brahms wrote that he is ‘in the shadows’. He was not quite (or at all) himself. This was a frequent observation of those who spend an hour, a lunch, or a whole day with Ian: he switched moods and was often self-contradictory. He was still travelling determinedly. A spiky quality could be seen when Ian met Ingrid Bergman, arriving late after a performance of A Lily in Little India at a dinner party where Bergman was the guest of honour. They were discussing what was wrong with the theatre. Straight away Ian said, ‘It’s the star system.’ ‘But we have to live,’ pleaded Bergman, with perhaps a degree of false modesty, ‘won’t you give us a chance?’ Ian turned on her his peeled and steady look, and into the silence said a very firm, ‘No!’ He subsequently denied any memory of ever saying this, but in essence this was undoubtedly how he was.
Meantime the money kept pouring in as he appeared in an Anglo-American TV version of The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1982 as the wily evil Chauvelin, who pursues Blakeney, with Jane Seymour as Marguerite (with a part, too, for Sean).
In 1981 Ian had been up to see Sean appear at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in The Maid’s Tragedy, but Sean clearly felt his liaison with Ian, widely known in theatrical circles, hardly promoted his fortunes as an actor. According to Sean, he was sitting feeling very bored at another play in the Edinburgh Festival, while the audience loved it. ‘I can do better than this,’ he thought. He turned to play-writing, latching on to the well-known theatrical figures of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence as a schematic device. This turned quickly from ‘a scream from inside me’ into a fully fledged play called Cowardice, which subsequently Anthony Page seized from his hands at a dinner party, and which Duncan Weldon, with the star backing of Ian and Jill Bennett in the two main roles, decided to produce in the small West End Ambassadors Theatre.
The brilliant Times critic Anthony Masters (whose life was later tragically cut short) was not complimentary at all: ‘In the theatre where the Master [Coward] gave a celebrated prompt from his stage-box on the opening night of Hay Fever and fumed when [Hermione] Gingold and [Hermione] Baddeley went a bit too far in Fallen Angels, Ian McKellen and Janet Suzman now play a brother and sister in a Peckham basement rehearsing a Cowardish play, supposedly dictated by Sir Noël from the grave, with champagne bottles full of supermarket ginger ale.’
Jack Tinker, the Mail critic, in his review explained, ‘[I] bent over backwards’ to be kind to Mathias, who was ‘among those who were on the small personal side of my Christmas card list … By contrasting slightly shabby pastiches of Coward’s high-life wit with the desperate low-life remoteness of their existence, the play tackles with varying degrees of success such absorbing themes as the nature of theatrical illusion itself; that hazy divide between adult reality and childish make-believe that is also the borderline between sanity and madness.’
Daunted by the grand West End opening of McKellen and Suzman impersonating Noël and Gertie, and Page’s formidable directorial talents, Tinker concluded, after gently pointing to the overall lack of focus, ‘I cannot help feeling, almost ashamedly, that the public would have been better prepared had they been allowed to discover Mr Mathias’s undoubted talents at their own pace and in their own good time, under less hot-house conditions.’ The outcome had been total disaster.
But Mathias was not to be daunted. Sean’s philosophy, in his own words, was, ‘This whole business works on people wanting to do favours for their mates, but it also works on self-interest.’ Years later he proudly recalled how actor Edward Hardwick at the post-opening party handed him a pen with the words, ‘Please write another play immediately.’ Mathias took up Hardwick’s exhortation and wrote an even worse play, called Infidelities, a labyrinth of sexual encounters of every conceivable kind, and Poor Nanny, a family play about the aged nanny of a rich, grotesque, dysfunctional family. McKellen declined or was too busy to be in either. Of Poor Nanny, Milton Shulman said, ‘Why did Mathias write this?’ while Tinker called it, ‘A gross folie de riguer mortis’.
Yet Mathias’s skill with dialogue attracted others. Infidelities, directed by no less than Richard Olivier, son of Laurence, enjoyed a week’s run at the Donmar, also starring Jill Bennett, then went even further down the slippery slope of critical disfavour, although according to Sean, Jill Bennett ‘wouldn’t let it [the production] go’. Sean took it to Paul Raymond and his seamy Boulevard Theatre, calling the venue, ‘tatty but charming, like an off-Broadway lounge’. Again with Ian’s backing, Sean and Bennett formed the Avenue Theatre Company. Here it would seem to have stopped. But then, remarkably, showing he had talent after all, another Mathias play, A Prayer for Wings, was taken up by Anne Mannion and directed by Joan Plowright no less at the Edinburgh Festival, where it won critical plaudits, played to full houses and then enjoyed a spell at the Bush Theatre in London. Sean seemed to have a somewhat contradictory play-writing career, although he did write another play, for, as one feature put it, ‘had he not been so well connected in his world, his story would not read quite so much like a chapter from Who’s Who in Theatre.‘
Ian was the faithful lover. They set up home together in Ian’s dockland, a quiet riverside nest near to The Grapes, the finest pub in Limehouse. So how do we view and characterise this attachment, which lasted ten years in intense form, and then as a curious and unusual ongoing friendship – a ‘post- or exquasi-marriage’ – for the rest of Ian’s life? It was quite stormy over the years they were together: for, as Tony Kushner writes in Angels in America, ‘It’s not always kind to be gentle and soft, there’s a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people.’ And then, elsewhere, in The Illusion: ‘Love is the world’s infinite mutability … it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.’ This was love more à la Tennessee Williams, encompassing paradox. It was not quite the same as that permanent, non-conformist Christian devotion Ian had seen in Denis and Margery, and then in Denis and stepmother Gladys, but perhaps sometimes not all that far from the spiritual union that was so prevalent in Shakespeare:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds.
The truth about McKellen and Mathias’s attachment to each other is that it has lasted.