‘I don’t believe in labels like success and failure’
Paul Scofield
The last time I saw Peter Hall, the Cambridge Mafia Godfather, before his death in 2017, was when I sat next to him in the front row of the Donmar production of Derek Jacobi’s Lear and we had a drink in the interval. I had liked and admired Hall ever since I joined the first Royal Shakespeare Company as an assistant director in 1962 and met him time after time, after I stopped directing, with each theatre biography I have written, drawing on his eloquence and rich fund of knowledge.
The National Theatre under John Dexter had been anti-Oxbridge, with Dexter humiliating Derek Jacobi for his poor make-up. When Derek messed up during one performance of Saint Joan, became entangled with a huge cross, and slithered across the stage, Dexter accosted him afterwards, shouting ‘Fucking university actors! Go back to Cambridge!’ Cambridge had ultimately captured the National when Peter Hall usurped and unseated Olivier, and from then on the anti-Thatcher liberals were in charge and the theatre for a while lost any infusion of right-wing playwrights. Olivier might have used Tynan as his left-wing gadfly to prick and provoke, to encourage in-fighting and rivalry, but when Hall took over, it was the arrival of the apparatchik rule and dismissal of dissenters.
Hall never considered directing in itself to be a satisfying creative activity, but instead saw it as a dedicated profession. He constantly needed to have his identity confirmed by being passionately in love, at least until his older years, and if unhappy in this as he frequently was, could counterbalance it with his achievements as a director and company leader. He thrived on his judicious choice of talents, while juggling with insecure and unpredictable circumstances: ‘a truly creative talent that makes something out of nothing is never uncertain,’ he wrote in his diary, constantly proclaiming his own insecurity. Reading through Hall’s diaries of the years 1971–80 one is struck by his undoubted determination and attachment to artistic quality, whatever his faults and his overreaching ambition. Hall knew what was good and what was bad in the theatre for his generation and was drawn to what was good like a magnet.
Dexter was not the only one resistant to the Cambridge mafia and Peter Hall. Brian Cox says Hall ‘hijacked the theatre’. Anthony Hopkins was uneasy at the dominance, while the ‘boardroom’ method of direction had made a particular casualty of Albert Finney’s Hamlet. The criticism of these and others was that the 1950s post-war generation ‘Up for grabs’ attitude relied on the traditional feudal hierarchy of Cambridge to spread its influence through the theatre and allied artistic professions.
Ian’s first encounter with Hall as a director was in 1980 when he took over the role of Salieri in the New York production of Amadeus, which had been premiered in London with Paul Scofield as Salieri.
McKellen, together with Jacobi, had been on John Dexter’s original list of potential Salieris, as the play had been initially intended as his directorial vehicle at the National. Gielgud had been another possibility but was considered to suffer from problems of memory and energy, while Scofield’s problem, wrote Dexter to Hall, was saintliness. None had or could show expertise in the expression of passion for ‘tit and slit’, as Dexter charmingly put it, but the younger pair were considered to be unflustered by Shaffer’s habit of constantly changing his text. While Shaffer offered the play first to Dexter, it seemed Scofield was not Dexter’s first choice, and anyway he had said at first he was not keen to do it at the National. Disagreements were resolved when Hall, the second choice, took it over. Dexter spent hours on the text, and after Hall had firmly taken over direction, Dexter demanded a percentage.
Hall had from the start only one choice for Salieri – Scofield. In fact the imbalance the ever-perfectionist (or change for change’s sake) Shaffer found in the London production, was that Mozart was shown up too much as the villain. Salieri’s own evil aspiration was not sufficiently strong, as Shaffer explained in revising the play for Broadway.
In his own ‘mini-biography’ Ian writes, ‘I originated the role of Antonio Salieri in the Broadway production of Amadeus.‘ This is perhaps a slight exaggeration, for the production had been a resounding success in London in Hall’s production. While there was a distinct difference in their performances, nothing could disguise the fact that it had been Scofield who originated the role, but had turned his back on the success and fame that would follow from doing the role again on Broadway. Michael Winner expressed utter incomprehension and surprise, as in his opinion no one ever did anything like that just to tackle Macbeth, which was Scofield’s reason. According to Winner, Scofield could have been the toast of New York and earned a million dollars.
McKellen did just that. A big PR exercise was made by him and his court to establish how much ‘better’ his performance was in New York compared to Paul’s at the National. Simon Callow, who played Mozart in London, though not in New York, and saw the new production there, stressed how very different it was from Scofield’s extraordinary baroque performance, emphasised by substantial changes Shaffer made to the text. ‘One of the faults I believe existed in the London version was simply that Salieri had too little to do with Mozart’s ruin. Now, in this new American version, he stands where he properly belongs – at the wicked centre of the action.’
McKellen took every opportunity the text offered to make Salieri more explicitly evil. No one could ever deny he made the text entirely his own. When he had seen Scofield in London he could ‘only glimpse him through half-closed fingers lest a particular moment be etched on the eyeballs and later inhibit me’. His triumph was complete, his control total both of the anger and envy, and the ecstasy of his resentful envious denunciation, with its erotic and sexual undercurrent of misogyny (in the seduction of Constanze) utterly convincing. Walter Kerr, in a rapturous description of the performance in the New York Times, referred to his ‘uninvited ecstasy’ of listening to the voice of God, namely Mozart, ‘which had not come from Salieri himself, but from a man whose voice is that of an obscene child’. Kerr commented on McKellen’s ‘extraordinarily small gestures’. The production was a sell-out. The triumph was unalloyed, with Ian making the million dollars instead of Scofield, and Peter Hall, strapped for cash and in the throes of wooing the temperamental opera star Maria Ewing, making three-quarters of a million.
Ian, the cast and the production were showered with awards, chief of which was the Tony Award for Best Actor. He and Sean Mathias wallowed in the New York adulation, with limousines, universal fêting and recognition, and Ian gratified his hosts, saying he had always wanted to be on Broadway from the beginning. The old puritan reserve would kick in slightly, and he would become circumspect, claiming, a bit coyly, that what was delightful about New York ‘seems to me to be what was delightful about childhood. There’s always something to look forward to. A parade. A birthday. And they give you such wonderful presents. Gift-wrapped. None of this is very important, but it’s so nice.’ The Tony Award, he conceded, was helpful to his case, and getting things done. ‘I went to the laundry and the man said he couldn’t get my suit back till Monday. I said, “But you’ve got to! I’m on the Tonys on Sunday.” “You’re on the Tonys! Great! Sure!”‘
Scofield had said his year-long New York run in A Man for All Seasons was enough to last him a lifetime and he vowed he would never go back. Taking a leaf from the previous Salieri’s book, Ian refused the US tour, and withdrew exhausted from the fray, saying he had lost all interest in the theatre, and could not even think about work. He lamented he had not been more interested in financial investment now he was well off. ‘Americans are still forty-niners at heart,’ he said. ‘They like to dig for gold. They’re always mining. They are not good gardeners. To create fine theatre you plant little seeds. You should nurture and cross fertilise your plants, and try to produce a black tulip.’ But he spent his earnings well, buying his riverside house in Limehouse.
Ian always claimed that Scofield deep down was pre-eminently the actor’s actor. Here Ian was following in the footsteps of the master of self-conservation and integrity. But there was a sting in the tale of Ian’s involvement with Amadeus: he was seriously miffed when the film role eluded him in favour of F. Murray Abraham, who won the Oscar.
After Amadeus, Ian was no less sceptical than others of coming under Hall’s wing, which was now offered at the National Theatre. He was, as Anthony Holden reported in 1984, ‘wary’ of joining it, ‘hating the place’ and ‘all it stood for’. Donning his journalist’s cap in a radio assessment, McKellen observed that Hall was the new breed of artistic director which runs the British theatre, and elaborated more kindly, but still with a touch of hubris: ‘It’s still too early for me to speculate as to how Sir Peter balances his burdensome responsibilities as the leader of such a large army. Sometimes you see him in the staff canteen, concentrating a little too hard on his plate of French fries, as if avoiding a stagehand with a grievance! At the other end of the canteen, there is likely to be a huddle of actors complaining, as actors tend to do, sometimes justifiably … the director [i.e. Hall] slumps neglected and lonely at home or, just as probably, gets down to planning his next show.’
This criticism is very typical McKellen, borderline accepting, but passing judgement from a quite magisterial position (and just having made Hall three-quarters of a million dollars in New York). ‘All artistic directors of my acquaintance are workaholics, divorced and very charming,’ he goes on.
Hall set Peter Gill to direct Ian first in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d in which he somewhat unexpectedly took the role of Pierre, a greater challenge than he might have wished. Perhaps Jaffeir, which Michael Pennington played, might have given him more scope for self-torture, irony and treachery. But he had done plenty of that recently as Salieri, and as Pierre Ian produced resonant echoes of Scofield’s darkly sonorous performance, in an earlier famous production with Gielgud at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and gathered considerable plaudits for an unselfish restraint. He did cavil slightly at the unhistrionic nature of the role, saying, ‘I wish I had a more spectacular death.’
Wild Honey, Michael Frayn’s adaptation of Chekhov’s sprawling untitled first play usually referred to as Platonov, brought Ian enormous scope playing the lead, again a meticulously detailed and yet carefree performance in which he completely dominated the stage with his volatile character, in contrast to the surrounding company. Once again, as he had with Face in The Alchemist in 1977 for the RSC, he was playing a heartless creature. In his review of the earlier production of Ben Jonson’s play, J. C. Trewin wrote how Ian always surprised: ‘You never know how you may find him. He is a man of peak-end value.’ Here was a hint of Ian the man.
Face and Platonov, with their auspicious appearances, have much in common. Wild Honey, unperformed in Chekhov’s lifetime, is farce and tragedy in one. Platonov, the wannabe Byron schoolmaster who berates his villagers with the truth about themselves, descends through drink and reckless seduction, mixed with high-minded principles, to suicide. ‘His reactions are always two steps ahead,’ wrote Wardle of Ian’s performance.
Milton Shulman, never easy to please, wrote of Platonov in Wild Honey: ‘McKellen is superb, and then superbly funny, lancing his self-frustration by taunting the company with eloquent supercilious humour and placating the women who love him with increasingly desperate stratagems until finally vodka and self-pity take control. His Platonov manages to be both Chekhovian and Fraynian and still utterly true to life; it is a brilliant dual creation.’ McKellen confirms Shulman’s point in the old adage ‘you can’t begin to be funny without being truthful,’ adding, ‘a good reason why today so many comedians are so remarkably unfunny.’ Platonov was both effortless, easy and completely unforced, with Ian’s timing and responses, further to Wardle’s comment, always two thoughts ahead. This kind of electricity aligns him as an image with Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. Prometheus’s punishment was to be forever chained to a rock, Ian’s to be forever chained to his career and self-image.
These first two plays were done in the Lyttelton Theatre, and just as Nunn had bided his time at Stratford before he did Macbeth with Ian, Hall waited before he cast Ian as Coriolanus, directing the play himself. This was Ian’s third National Theatre production. Once again Ian had the chance to rival Olivier and assume his mantle, and once again McKellen chose a modern parallel to base his character on. This time it was Muhammad Ali at his height, with a different slant. Coriolanus is fighting not on behalf of himself, as an athlete tends to do, but on behalf of his society, his city, and the country he had lived in. ‘I see that side of him as being admirable…’ Continuing the sporting hero idea, he also based Coriolanus’s arrogance on John McEnroe, the tennis star, who had won Wimbledon a third time and quarrelled with the umpire.
As usual both before, during and after the production which ran on the open stage of the Olivier Theatre, McKellen eloquently gave his exposition of what he was doing, a habit operating sometimes in inverse ratio to the finished result. As his magnetism charms wherever he is, he virtually took over the PR department of the National. With an arm (metaphorically if not actually) around everyone’s shoulder, he was the master of ‘Trev-ing’. ‘He arrives late to the party and then takes the party over,’ said Brian Cox.
Apart from the five scenes he played with Volumnia, who was Irene Worth, the physicality of this performance was remarkable. His complete and near naked athleticism in his fight with Aufidius was achieved by many hours spent in the gym, under the tutelage of a fitness trainer (so that he could match the fourteen-years-younger Greg Hicks as Aufidius). But the mixture of classical and modern in Hall’s resident designer John Bury’s costumes and set, unnerved and puzzled Ian, as well as the rest of the cast. ‘Oh, dear,’ said Bill Moody, one of the citizens, ‘they were sort of “eclectic”.’ One member, Sean Bean, just out of drama school, and cast as the First Citizen and Ian’s understudy, left after a day, while Hall’s notion to have members of the audience on stage paying £2 each to join in the action as the Roman rabble, increased the stress level.
Hall fell ill and missed parts of rehearsal. Hicks and McKellen rehearsed on their own, incorporating the homoerotic engagement which had worked so well in Tyrone Guthrie’s production at Nottingham when Ian played Aufidius opposite John Neville. Jacqueline Fletcher, who took the role of Virgilia, recalls, for Barratt, Ian slumped unhappily on a stool in the Green Room, all on his own, with a bottle of champagne in a bucket unceremoniously in front of him, not coming over to talk to anybody, while no one went over to talk to him. Usually he was ‘such an upright person’. He managed to wriggle out of the mustardy-coloured, timeless costume Bury and Hall had picked for him, and chose his own ‘white cashmere belted overcoat slung around the shoulders and a blue shirt and tie with his sword nonchalantly slung over his shoulder’. Underneath was a brilliant white suit, and he sported shades (but without McEnroe’s tennis racket!).
Later, in one preview, when Coriolanus is about to be killed for betraying the Volsces, delivering the lines, ‘Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads…’ he began to rip off his jacket, but could not divest himself of his trousers over his ankle boots. In the end he did get down to the loin cloth. It was often extreme as he tuned in to the vitriol, the anger, the hatred in the role as he singled out members of the audience to aim the lines directly at them, so some became scared and wanted to break the eye contact. His was a love affair with the audience, but also a love-hate affair as he projected his anger, in a very visceral way. So where did Coriolanus end and Ian take over?
The first-night critics had grave reservations, baulking at the on-stage exhibitionism of the privileged rabble Hall had placed there. Benedict Nightingale noted,
I’ve seen more suddenness and ponderosity in the throng at a bring-and-buy sale than at the National Theatre last Saturday. Early in Coriolanus one of the Roman generals exotically claims that he’s as good at telling the sound of the title character’s ‘tongue from every meaner man’ as shepherds are at distinguishing thunder from tabors. One knows what he means, because the tongue in question belongs to Ian McKellen and has just been heard transforming the simple sentence ‘Come I too late?’ into ‘Caahm Ai too laiyate? … At the point of death the word ‘boy’ becomes a weird gurgling wail of “booyaahayaaee”. In fact, there are times when one feels that Mr McKellen’s tongue has invented a new tongue.
Nightingale, a great and affectionate McKellen advocate, still stuck out for his ‘present eminence’ becoming ‘pre-eminence’. According to Joy Lesley Gibson, Ian’s first biographer, he totally mis-said, ‘My gracious silence’, that lovely line indicative in Shakespeare of a man’s love for a woman, although much later he was to kiss Wendy Morgan as Virgilia with sexy rapture.
Maybe it was because Peter Hall had never been much in evidence, but after it opened, as by now almost a habit, McKellen’s persistence and determination as it worked itself into the production turned what was an eclectic muddle into a resounding triumph. Audiences cheered, while the cast attested to how great Ian was in leading a company, behaving without any air of superiority, and even making tea for them.
The rest of the second spell at the National, while he eschewed any chance or pressure to assume a more managerial role, was spent running a group enterprise with Edward Petherbridge, his old colleague and friend from the Actors’ Company. Hall had divided his company into five different groups of actors, and decided to give McKellen his head by putting him in charge of one group with Ted Petherbridge so they could go their own way. The actor-manager in Ian, out of Hall’s direct control, was given free rein. By this means Hall, often guilty of having his cake and eating it, kept Ian’s prestigious name in his regime as director.
‘You’ve got to have someone you can blame,’ said Roy Kinnear in an interview in the Observer in 1985, and the McKellen–Petherbridge choice, Philip Prowse from Glasgow Citizens Theatre, came in for a lot of stick with Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the first production of this new group. Ian played Bosola, ideal villain-casting which he relished and could really let himself go in, unshackled from the romantic lead image that dogged him. The image lingered, and when a young woman came up to him with obvious intent after a performance, and he told her, ‘I’m gay,’ she responded,’ Surely, you’re still gorgeous.’
Prowse undoubtedly put his actors off, with Ian commenting at a public seminar that Prowse was a director ‘capable of admitting publicly that he is not in the least interested in actors’ opinions and would as soon work with marionettes’. Later that year in his South Bank Show appearance, Ian said to interviewer Melvyn Bragg that at one rehearsal Prowse told him he ‘couldn’t act’ and had no truck with actors’ attempts to understand their characters’ psychology.
No one thought this continuation of the McKellen–Petherbridge partnership was a great success. When Kenneth Branagh in the year before had proposed to Terry Hands that he’d like to act in and have a company of his own, Hands told him, ‘Don’t. Ian McKellen tried running actors’ companies three times and still hasn’t got it right.’ But it drew the crowds, had its moments, and when it played New York on tour, as was often the case, it received a higher level of gush and a lower level of critical discernment than back home. The company went on to perform a double bill of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic, with Ian as Hound and Puff, another echo here again of Olivier, although Olivier had done Oedipus in Oedipus Rex in an adventurous leap from the sublime to the ridiculous in his Old Vic double bill in 1945. Ian only went from the present-day ridiculous to the period ridiculous. Brilliant crowd-pleasers, yes, although John Peter fired a familiar warning shot across the forging bows of his relentless, arch bumptiousness and bizarre North Country accent, like a cross between Gracie Fields and Frankie Howerd: ‘It isn’t always easy to tell him apart from the characters in his play.’
The Cherry Orchard, their last play, translated by Richard Cottrell, was pure redemption. Performed in the smaller Cottesloe (now known as the Dorfman) Theatre at the National, with Ian as Lopakhin, it created the perfect atmosphere for Chekhov’s last play, to which the director Mike Alfreds applied the Stanislavski method of spontaneity. So performances varied from night to night but were commended for their naturalism. But later on tour it would seem to have lost some of its freshness and subtlety, and it was a bit affected by Ian’s tendency to add a nightly touch of improvisation, which slowed down the performance. This sealed the fate of this experiment, and in May 1986 Hall disbanded the group.
Ian’s variable fortune tossed him here and there in the 1980s and had in its wallet of oblivion a further production of Wild Honey, in the US, and two hundred performances of Acting Shakespeare – his one-man show, which had risen out of Words, Words, Words – for an eight-month trek across the States, which left him deciding in late 1987 that he was clear he had absolutely no desire to do a play on Broadway again.
Acting Shakespeare, one of those simple formulas where a great actor could cash in on his own fame and wow crowds by the tens of thousands, was an entertainment, or solo extended cabaret act, which went back to McKellen’s RSC days as Romeo and Macbeth. Its genesis was the informal, almost casual Words, Words, Words which he devised prior to Macbeth, and which made a virtue of its unpreparedness. It exemplified the passion of someone who simply could not get enough of performing. In this prototype for the more polished later product, Acting Shakespeare, McKellen would intercut snippets from roles he had played with extracts from Samuel Pepys’s diary, bureaucratic communiqués, entries from Roget’s Thesaurus and even that old chestnut, the great star standby, the alphabetically listed London telephone directory (as Ralph Richardson had done).
This was a dressing-up occasion for the middle-class, gala-frequenting audience who loved Ian and Shakespeare in a joint cultural event. Ian was instinctively ‘to the manner born’ a master of this sort of entertainment and would indulge his passion for being the travelling provincial player whenever he had a gap in his schedule. He would not bring it to London, not at least for the time being, and he was extraordinarily generous in putting this crowd-pleaser at the service of a charity he approved of, and schoolmasterly too, in insisting on its educational outreach and value.
Everyone in the performance arts loves one-man shows for obvious managerial and financial reasons. By the late 1980s Ian had morphed Words, Words, Words into a prodigiously accomplished, top-of-the-range entertainment product, with no longer scribble crib sheets to hand, and not quite so much of the knockabout informality of the earlier show. This was not quite so possible in thousand-plus-seater theatres in Washington or in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the old Bolton Silcocks Brothers kid, happy to stomp the fairgrounds in barnstorming style, but now on a hitherto unforeseeably gargantuan scale. This was the tough, coarser side of his touring, but there was equally the ex-Cambridge prestige of British Council tours of continental capital cities, and even, if the gap materialised, Broadway. The great chameleon, shifting nimbly from role to role, male to female, analytical to gawky, emotional to cold and heroic, was a marvel to everyone: all embraced and encompassed in his huge Protean stage presence, so beautifully controlled ‘that the tears pricked the back of your eyes; it was so skilful a manipulation of an audience’. When Benedict Nightingale followed it on the tour for his Fifth Row Centre, he noted that McKellen, as well as saying that the most reliable director of his plays is Shakespeare himself, asked ‘the odd question – “Can anyone name a single happy marriage in Shakespeare?” When someone suggested The Taming of the Shrew he grinned and said, “I try to do the jokes in this show!” Yet there are happy marriages in Shakespeare, and many happy marriage endings.’ Not for the first time McKellen the politician and activist was marshalling Shakespeare to endorse his own opinions.
So here McKellen was, in his own clothes, jeans and T-shirt, or tweed, seated in a chair in front of the curtains conjuring up the greatest conjuror of all time.
One day in January 2012 in The Grapes, the picturesque Thames-side pub near McKellen’s Limehouse home, I explored with Ian who Shakespeare was for him. Built in the early eighteenth century, The Grapes is redolent with history and literature. Charles Dickens visited here in 1820, describing it in Our Mutual Friend: ‘A tavern of dropsical appearance … suspended over the water [like] a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.’ Advertised at the Tower Hill tube station is ‘The Jack the Ripper Walk’.
Ian and I were snugly seated at a small table in a corner furthest away from the river. He told me about a trip he and Derek Jacobi made to Derek’s house in France:
‘What I remember most about that trip … was that I had had a conversation late at night with Derek and Richard Clifford about Shakespeare and who he was.
‘“Let’s not talk about that,” said Derek, “because you’ll get angry.”
‘“Oh no,” I said, “I won’t.”
‘“Yes, you will,” said Derek.
‘So I said, “No, please tell me, I want to know.”‘
‘So they started together [ on their belief the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare]. I said, “Whoah, hang on there a moment! All I know about whoever wrote the plays was that they were steeped in theatre; the idea that whoever wrote the plays was an actor makes absolute sense to me. It’s the overriding thrust of all the plays that all the world is a stage. He didn’t write novels, he was perfectly capable of doing that, he didn’t write epic poems, he wasn’t Homer. He didn’t preach other great ideas or anything, he wrote plays. So what has the Earl of Oxford got to do with plays?”
‘“Oh well,” they said, “the Earl of Oxford had a theatre company.” – I didn’t know that.
‘“And how could Shakespeare learn about plays?”
‘“Well, theatre companies used to go through Stratford.”
‘“Yes, yes, yes, we know about all that…”‘
No longer faint-hearted, The Grapes bustled with customers as we talked, its walls proudly displaying oils and watercolours of Limehouse subjects. Over the noise, unguarded, Ian lost his usual reserve, sounding off to the top of his compass.
‘And then we got on to school! And I said, “Well, he went to the grammar school in Stratford.” And they said, “There is no evidence he went to the grammar school in Stratford!” So I said, “There is no evidence that anyone went to the grammar school in Stratford because they didn’t keep records, so where does that get us?” At which point I cried out, “Oh Derek!” And completely lost my temper, which is what Derek said I would do, so the discussion was very short, was volcanic at the end from my point of view, and I thought they were talking absolute rubbish, and they’d clearly had it so many times with other people, so many of their friends, that they didn’t want to have it any more … I think some professional historian told him there was no evidence…’
‘I believe it was Mark Rylance who convinced him of this,’ I suggested as Ian’s indignation wound down.
‘Mark is a romantic and a conspiracy theorist,’ Ian says quite sharply. ‘Not an intellectual at all.’
‘But, like Derek, Shakespeare came from nothing and yet was a genius.’
‘You got it!’
Yet Ian had his own different agenda on Shakespeare’s sexuality, which notably emerged in a disagreement with Anne Barton, John’s wife, a Trinity College, Cambridge, fellow and Shakespeare authority. Ian’s view could be summed up as ‘Did he sleep with another man? I would say yes.’ Anne said Ian was ‘barking up the wrong tree. I don’t think for an instant Shakespeare slept with a young man. You won’t find an academic consensus that Shakespeare was gay.’
Ian’s argument that he had, rested on the understanding Shakespeare had of gay relationships. This argument would have had Tennessee Williams and Terence Rattigan sleeping with women.
But the arguments about Shakespeare apart, Ian had demonstrated a breathtaking range of endeavour and shown himself fearless in taking on a challenge, becoming almost in one breath the toast of Broadway and a dangerously unconventional Coriolanus back home. He embraced danger and he liked walking on a tightrope. He was about to find a new trial, having learnt that what looks like disaster, with time and a few different twists, could become victory.