Bent had had its first and fullest season nine years earlier, first at the Royal Court and then at the Criterion. In 1990 there was a revival of the production, with Ian as Max and Michael Cashman as Horst. (Cashman soon left the cast to become a politician, and was elected as an MEP in 1999. Christopher Eccleston took over the role.) It was directed by Sean Mathias. Robert Chetwyn, Bent‘s first director, had felt that he had done what he could, and found it hurtful that no one had even bothered to invite him to do it again. Much later, when McKellen had asked who were his favourite directors, he answered Guthrie, Chetwyn and Nunn.
Time was turning back the clock here because on a personal level, and apart from the impact it made, the controversy shown, and rapturous tumult it stirred up, the revival somehow must have had an elegiac resonance for McKellen and Mathias. It was their joint shared enthusiasm that had led to the original production.
The original statement of Bent was made nine years before McKellen came out. When he first performed Max, Ian had been unhappy that the part had not led him out of his ‘musty cupboard, with nothing more stimulating than a skeleton for company’. But he had found it ‘a thrill to act out in public the inner drama and secrets, and publishing the secrets I had in my heart…’
Even though Denis was dead, the fear that had he known he might still have disowned his son must have stayed centrally with Ian. Yet ultimately in Bent, in the barbarity of the extermination camp life, no feeling is carried through: the feelings of love are transient. In his ruthless survivor’s streak, Max coldly turns a blind eye to the death of Rudi, his previous love (in an echo here of Romeo’s previous passion for Rosalind in Romeo and Juliet).
Why was the Royal National Theatre now giving Ian stage-room? he asked. ‘He’s certainly not the first misfit I’ve played there. Bosola, Coriolanus and Platonov all leave Max standing. And after Max, I’m doing Richard III! His most reprehensible fault is one I have shared. When it suits him, Max denies he is gay. I shan’t spoil the plot by telling you the extreme form of his deviousness.’
Although instantly affecting as it was played by McKellen as Max, and Christopher Eccleston as Horst (who unlike Tom Bell was not fearful the scene of mutual orgasm would provoke laughter and not reverence), it was the star vehicle aspect of the play, as well as its boost to a new wave of the nakedly gay-rights agenda, which propelled Bent to public recognition. Productions all over the world followed, and then a film directed by Mathias.
When the earlier production had opened, McKellen had guardedly sidestepped the issue of total personal identification, refusing to be pinned down: ‘I had no hesitation in being in a gay play and to be publicly associated with a cause as well expressed and relevant to people in the modern world as this.’ Was he being carefully political? Or was it just that he knew that the moment was not right for him? There had been, too, the suspicion voiced by his new agent, James Sharkey, to whom McKellen had moved on the retirement of Elspeth Cochrane. (Elspeth lived to the age of ninety-four, having been at one stage duped or betrayed in some real estate scam. Ian attended her funeral.) According to Robert Chetwyn, Sharkey had distinct worries about the effect Bent might have on his client’s career. Instead the reverse happened.
On the occasion of the transfer in May 1990 of the Bent revival from the National to the Garrick, Bryan Appleyard interviewed Ian for the Sunday Times, under the headline of ‘The Portrait of an Actor as a Gay Man’. Appleyard resisted the initial outpouring of McKellen charm, and his opening salvo of how in Wigan market square as a child, Ian told how he was sexually attracted to the romantic, wild-looking gypsy-like men, and wanted to run off with them.
‘Aha,’ [Ian] says and points triumphantly, ‘I trailed that piece of meat across your path!’
Appleyard pointed out, ‘he has, more aggressively, more insistently, more relentlessly than any previous gay in public life, “come out”,’ and astutely added, ‘Yet there remains the uneasiness – that little trick to bring the subject up while leaving it open to himself to pretend that it was me all along.’
Appleyard probed to the extent of making Ian confess to the torture behind the issue, the self-drama, the subtext of the coming out. What had made him so angry, Ian responds, was that he had been conforming and destroying something right at the heart of himself, so much so that he asked, ‘What it is in our society that has made me do that is cruel, and as near evil as I can imagine?’
The reviews for this revival were in general favourable. Not as good as the previous production, was the general verdict, but Michael Coveney noted in his Observer review how the play now came across with a shattering intensity because the tragedy of AIDS had taken a turn for the worse, and was now ‘necessary’, while before, in the 1979 production, it was ‘merely mawkish and sensational’.
Among the heterosexual majority, said Coveney, there was still strong reluctance to accept homosexual love, with commentators such as George Gale, in the Mail, in August 1989, ‘suggesting all homosexuals were likely to spread AIDS, and therefore incipient murderers’. The audience was electrified by those love scenes in which, in breaks from lumbering stones from one side of the stage to the other, Max and Horst ‘make physical love by auto-erotic suggestion … getting your rocks off while keeping your socks on’ (quipped Coveney). ‘Bent‘s rallying cry – better to be out and dead than furtive and alive – is both cruel and harsh.’ Powerfully effective in creating tolerance and compassion, Ian demonstrated again, as he had effectively in Iago, the power of being both evilly obnoxious and pitiable. ‘One of the most stunning things I’ve ever seen,’ Martin Sherman told John Lahr for his profile of McKellen in the New Yorker in August 2007, came when the SS guard forced Max to beat his boyfriend to death to prove he wasn’t homosexual. ‘He was sitting there and he defecated. It was very subtle – but you saw in his body the spasm, which is what a person does in a period of such shock.’
The character Max stands for all the mass of people who died nameless, uncelebrated and forgotten. I identify here, undoubtedly, that again McKellen was stealing fire from heaven and playing, for the world to witness, a very Promethean role – this time willingly and exultantly chained to the rock of his sexuality.
But on occasions it could well seem that McKellen’s life from the beginning of his new celebrity was more than anything else about stardom and survival, and keeping those who worshipped him happy, rather than enduring love and forming relationships at a personal level. Perhaps he was already, now he was fifty, a fully paid-up member of that Establishment. ‘I hate authority,’ he told Vanity Fair two years after the Bent revival. ‘I’m part of the Establishment and all that so I can dismantle it…’