‘I despise the Ian McKellen of the first 49 years of my life’
Ian McKellen, 1991
To me there is no doubt that until the new century, together with Macbeth, McKellen’s other greatest Shakespearean role was that of Iago, which he played in Trevor Nunn’s production of Othello at the Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1989. As it was a year-and-a-half on from all the public, and no doubt private, turbulence and furore of his coming out, he could make a welcome return to his main career: ‘I am all actor; there is nothing more than the actor McKellen. It is my passion, my life.’
Iago is not one of the great four tragic heroes generally identified by critics as the peaks of Shakespeare’s art and is often brushed aside in the reputation game of great performances. Yet the part is a towering, dominating one. Says his friend Ted Petherbridge, ‘The acting instrument is the most difficult of all to play because it is the most complicated. It is the human personality itself.’ Ian’s acting instrument was about to be put to the test.
Trevor Nunn was a supreme casting entrepreneur. He had noted that the black operatic star Willard White had never been able to sing Verdi’s Otello because the role was written for a tenor and he was a bass-baritone. He had cast him in his Porgy and Bess triumph of 1986. Nunn said to him, ‘You can’t sing Otello, why don’t you play it in the theatre?’ Nunn was proud, he tells me, to make White the first black actor to play Othello since Paul Robeson (who had played it in the 1920s with Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona). Nunn cast Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona. He was to marry her five years later, after his divorce from his second wife, Sharon Lee-Hill.
Trevor commended White’s ‘tremendous insight and heightened naturalism in the heightened language.’ The thrilling deep, rich voice, the size and beauty of the man, meant there would be a combat, a contest of equals, not least physically. For Iago, Ian would set out to inhabit the part’s very character, up to the right body size to measure up to White. His body, his face, his hair, he has said many times, ‘they’re only interesting in terms of my work. Every haircut I’ve ever had has been for a role.’
Ian’s method of searching for contemporary parallels – for Richard II the god-Emperor Dalai Lama; for Macbeth the Kennedys and Ali (or the steely Coriolanus with the steroid-stiffened backbone of John F. Kennedy and Ali) – would not be possible with Iago. For there would be no escape possible from drawing upon all his resources, both inner and outer. He recreated a childhood memory, reported an old schoolfriend from Bolton, of an ex-army gymnastics master who smoked from a little box and saved half-cigarettes for later. ‘His Iago is very much of the barrack room, a soldier in his fussy fingertips, forever straightening his blanket, wiping used glasses, putting brandy in the basin of wine which he prepares for the drink scene,’ wrote Joy Leslie Gibson. ‘There was one magic moment when he realised he had caught everyone in his own trap … slowly, very slowly, his face went sodden, a look he used right at the end when he refused to say why he had done what he had.’
He didn’t know why. I saw Ian’s performance very much as a self-portrait: a man searching for himself. This was the actor of whom John Tydeman said to me in 2017, ‘When Ian looks at himself in a mirror, he does not know who he is.’ His Iago was perplexed, even overwhelmed by what inside him was unknown, but outwardly pursuing his plot for their downfall.
Iago’s evil was of a different dimension altogether from Macbeth’s. For Ian to deal with a classic without bringing to it the usual trappings of thought and analysis was a different experience both for him and for the audience. He saw at once that he needed to look no further than himself to be able to manipulate Othello’s emotions. ‘I haven’t even to delve into my past experience,’ he says. ‘Willard is so very athletic, very beautiful and attractive that when I see Imogen Stubbs, who is also very beautiful, in his arms, it doesn’t take much to be jealous of them.’
When I spoke to Nunn in 2018 he told me, ‘I saw the key to Ian as Iago was his apparent transparent honesty – “honest, honest Iago” – and that he induces jealousy in Othello because of his own jealousy of Michael Cassio.’
Why Iago was such a great part, and a great autobiographical role for Ian, was that he was by now able to understand in every way the skill of being able to turn a scene, create an impression, fabricate a feeling, lie plausibly and be a master of fake news. As Nunn put it before the play opened, ‘That chameleon quality in Ian makes him a wonderful person for Iago,’ adding (in reference to the fact that Ian was godfather to Trevor’s son Jacob), ‘and his ability to slip into another personality means he is wonderful with children; he becomes the best uncle that anyone could dream of.’
This may seem a sinister understatement for Iago, but what Nunn puts his finger on is that Ian is (as Olivier was) a great pantomime or music-hall entertainer. This is what he would bring to Iago. His Iago would be a W. C. Fields, an Arthur Askey, a Morecambe and Wise, as well as a serious evil demon.
As with Macbeth in 1976, Nunn’s production was conceived and then, in Benedict Nightingale’s word, ‘carpentered’ for the Other Place. (Nunn got Adrian Noble, the RSC artistic director, to postpone his proposed closure of the theatre. As he said to me in 2018, ‘I opened the bloody place, I want to close its stay of execution.’) As with Nunn’s Macbeth, the detail was perfect, this time with an Edwardian flavour in set and costumes, with a graphically accurate army camp in a hot steamy Cyprus which Othello is defending against the Turks. Ian showed the hunger, the stealth, Iago watching himself helplessly as the darkest longings fired by his ambition for power overwhelmed him. I was in the first-night audience, and wrote in Plays and Players that ‘there was an almost doleful striving after identity … in McKellen’s masterfully structured performance.’ The key to this was the way he was driven by envy, that most childish of emotions. Yet at heart ‘his distortions came from a lot of good qualities finely bent: he was a puritan, a protestant, a professional at anything he set out to accomplish … a clown, architect of disaster, dapper courtier and ageing, disillusioned NCO with racist leanings.’
The nonchalant way McKellen carried this off, offering all aspects of the character with a disdainful shrug of the shoulders, showed Iago’s heart was not in any of it. Why? Because, as he showed as Iago, he did not really identify with any of these roles. Crucially, he would just as soon be Othello, and as such would make a much better job of it than the Moor himself does. Yet in his vengeful pursuit of Othello’s downfall he brought out many facets of his character.
‘McKellen’s careful interpretation was dangerously experimental, that of an uncommitted character, observing himself at every stage, evaluating his own performance,’ I wrote in Plays and Players. It was chilling, yet for all the impeccable surfaces, McKellen also succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Iago remains a child at heart. What he and Trevor Nunn’s production managed so beautifully to convey was that the play is as much Iago’s tragedy as Othello’s: if Othello’s jealousy is blind and extreme, so is Iago’s envy … I concluded my review: ‘almost anything he [McKellen] does is memorable – something to be assembled afterwards in the memory – if not instantaneously affecting.’
Other critics were similarly enthusiastic: ‘[McKellen] with his ramrod back, swinging arms and clipped Northern consonants is the absolute embodiment of the professional soldier … he is an old sweat warped and corrupted by fantasies of power … he also induces compassion for this pitiable creature,’ said Michael Billington, while Benedict Nightingale summed up the long-term significance of the performance: ‘It is his Iago that theatre historians will surely be discussing, with its cast of twelve, drilled to precision, in a hundred years.’
There was an extraordinary episode in early 1988. It concerned a thin, sickly-looking girl. Her name was Rosemary Varne and from the balcony during a performance she screamed at Ian, ‘I love you! I’ll always love you’ over and over again. A security guard tried to take hold of her, and she fastened her teeth on to his arm and took a chunk out of it. And then she produced a knife and slashed her wrists. They managed to take her out and both she and the guard needed emergency treatment.
This highly explosive episode has to be compared with the obsessive behaviour of a deranged fan to Derek Jacobi, which shows both a remarkable similarity – and yet a distinctive difference. Jacobi’s crazed fan was a slow-burn stalker who out of a sense of rejected love took a poison-pen letter to Derek’s devoted parents, saying their son had tried to seduce him.
Many years later, at an Arts Society lunch given in his honour by the Critics’ Circle, Ian was on sterling form. He regaled the company with expressions of debt and gratitude to the critics. In particular, he said, he pays attention to the bad reviews. He expressed great affection for Harold Hobson and revealed that as Gandalf he didn’t get a whole lot of cranks writing to him, that fans were mainly quite well behaved and reverential. He reminisced about Justice Shallow at Cambridge with Michael Burrell as Slender.
He was still at his most boyish, his posture reminding me of Paul Scofield’s, head forward when seated, shoulders rounded, knees together, in a disposition of listening and surrender, occasionally turning and giving me a wink. And over a cigarette in the garden, he told me about a revealing moment in the Othello production. Willard White, somewhat upstaged by Ian, he suspects, not only was driven into homicidal jealousy by Iago’s manipulations, but inflamed equally by Ian’s performance.
‘One night he grabbed me by the lapels as he came off – “You’re talking to the audience. YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT ME.” “Well,” I told him, I said, “well … yes.”‘
Willard, who found the part made him anxious about portraying Othello’s murderous jealousy – something he found much more difficult than singing the operatic role – went on, ‘I saw you, you’re talking about me! You’re getting them on your side!!!’
‘Well,’ said Ian, ‘Othello’s in a world of his own…’
The green-eyed monster had taken over Willard in a wider than just sexual, conjugal sense …