‘We are not the personal creators of our truths, but only their exponents who thus make articulate the psychic needs of our day’
C. G. Jung
Career changes from show business to politics have accelerated in the new millennium, with in 2017 the television Apprentice host, Donald Trump, becoming US President. By comparison President Ronald Reagan, who had been a Hollywood B-movie star and even a screen villain, had a gruelling and formative rise as union leader and Governor of California. But it was too late for McKellen (who did once consider this, like Glenda Jackson, who became MP for Hampstead and Highgate and was Blair’s Junior Transport Minister), to take an active part beyond his commitment to gay equality and preaching tolerance on his visits to schools. He was still the ardent advocate, proud to visit over fifty secondary schools in two years. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he says.
I’ve met kids who think they’re anti-gay and you talk to them and it turns out they don’t know much about it, it’s not a subject that is talked about. But [to see] a young gay person who, at fourteen knows, and comes out successfully to his parents and family, teachers and friends, it’s astonishing. When you hear people saying, ‘You shouldn’t be talking about homosexuality in schools,’ well, if you don’t there is going to be another generation of people who are confused, bewildered, suspicious, threatened. These kids aren’t threatened by it.
He continued campaigning for Stonewall. He would take offence on behalf of the targets of jibes, an especial instance of this being when John Key, the New Zealand premier, said of David Beckham that he was handsome and a really nice guy, but ‘thick as batshit’. When Key told Jamie Mackay, a chat show host, that he would struggle at a charity golf event when wearing a ‘gay red top’, Ian weighed in, again declaring the Prime Minister should watch his language, and this could only encourage homophobia and reflect badly on New Zealand.
He soon would be embarking on the biggest text of all. The challenge was to outdo not only Olivier’s Lear, which perhaps was easy, but all the others who had played Lear, including Glenda Jackson. Still very self-questioning as he discussed his roles and habits, he still didn’t really know who he was, and yet again came back to the rationalisation which by now we can see was the openness behind which he hid himself. Eyre might have sounded somewhat foolish when he said of Ian: ‘He likes the smell of napalm in the morning,’ but it was true – he sees off anything that he perceives as a threat. His desire to keep himself hidden made him sometimes dangerous to other actors when he boils over, but it can inhibit him from freeing himself.
Who ‘blinked’ first, allowing him to play Lear for the RSC, or having Trevor Nunn, who directed by far his best two performances to date – Macbeth and Iago – in charge? Nunn is certain it was Ian. He asked him four times, finally threatening, ‘You’ve got to do it or I’ll never speak to you again.’ Nunn, no longer running the RSC, took it to the governors who suggested, ‘Why not a world tour?’ They threw in The Seagull as well, with Ian (as Trigorin) and Frances Barber (as Arkadina) to lead the tour. McKellen decided his time had come to play King Lear.
David Weston, who played the role of Gentleman and understudied McKellen, heard a loud shriek as Frances Barber, cast as Goneril, made her first entrance in rehearsal, and as she and Weston kissed like ‘luvvies’ he asked her what she was doing playing Goneril to ‘Sir Ian McKellen when she is such a bosom pal of Sir Derek Jacobi.’ Barber laughed and told him Derek was planning to give his Lear in the future. She was here with his full permission.
They elected to do it first in the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford, a replica of the Other Place, so ‘we were getting away from the traditional production with the theme of Lear as a Tsarist, surrounded by Orthodox trappings, assuming Godhead, and it was impossible to rebel against God. ‘This was completely new territory,’ says Nunn, ‘as when Lear mean-spiritedly wants Goneril to have a deformed child, in this production he smokes a cigar.’ McKellen had not seen Scofield’s original Lear in the legendary Brook production of 1962, but had listened to John Tydeman’s 2001 radio production for Paul’s eightieth birthday. ‘I pinched his wolfish double barking howl on the second two words of “You unnatural hags” when he turns on his daughters before departing for the storm.’
Nunn from the start, as recorded in Weston’s wry and highly readable diary of the production, pointed to the similarity between Jacobi and McKellen at their first encounter with their understudy: with a touch of possessiveness McKellen placed a sympathetic hand on Weston’s shoulder and told him that he would not be off. ‘I remember Derek Jacobi saying the same thing at Chichester in 1995,’ Weston writes, ‘and then having appendicitis on the opening night. Decide to start learning Lear as soon as possible.’
Lear is regarded as the greatest play by the world’s greatest playwright. Here we witness Ian at the pinnacle, embodying the main role for the RSC, followed by a world tour. How did his approach differ from Olivier’s? To play a great king like Lear, Olivier believed, you had to be imaginatively convinced that his crown and all it entails is solemnised and conferred to him by God at his coronation. You need this to play it properly. But how would McKellen, who most emphatically did not have the same attachment to spiritual values, approach it? For him, it was about studying royal ritual and his own. It is about sanctioning. How would he demonstrate his belief that kingship is created entirely by the way other people react to you?
He illustrated this with an example from a sit-down dinner he threw for forty on New Year’s Eve 1999. One of the entertainments for the evening was to watch the Queen going by boat to the Millennium Dome. He was dismayed to see this unattractive vessel chugging downriver. ‘She was on City Cruises! If she hadn’t been wearing lime green, one wouldn’t have noticed. We wanted proper people rowing her up. I wanted her to do the job superbly.’ Here he criticised the Queen for not acting with royal importance, acting like ‘royalty’, acting as a service industry with a moral purpose. It satisfied the preacher in him that providing thrills for the audience, showing an enormous range of feeling and an instruction or exposition of his forensic detection method, was a service industry. But he would also always try to show it was much more than that.
Confronted with playing Lear, as he did in 2012, Jacobi had a similar point. ‘So who is He, the actor? Is He good or is He evil?’ He calls all the prying and probing to discover the ‘real him’ as all rather primitive.
When you play the King you don’t play the King, you play the man inside the King because everybody is doing the King for you, bowing and scraping and walking backwards, plus you’re the only one who gets to sit down. It is situation that drives and directs character. When friends say you have behaved out of character, I think they are wrong. Anything is possible. Given the circumstances you could murder someone; given another you could selflessly give your life. It is the interaction between people which defines them.
‘Don’t try to show all the character,’ warned Peter Hall in similar vein. Ian set out in the five months of rehearsal striving to do just this. He seemed at the start not at all at ease with where he was going with Lear. Richard Hoggart wrote, in his influential book The Uses of Literacy: ‘The scholarship boy has been equipped for hurdle-jumping, so he merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world’s way … He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual, and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and over-wound-up.’ Unlike his approach earlier to Macbeth, which Michael Grandage praised as the Macbeth for two or three generations – and possibly because there was no equivalent weight of Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth in the cast – he was all at sea.
There was no search or comparison with a present-day figure: how could there be? Lear is Lear, a law unto himself. Nunn saw him as pitiless. He described the play’s ‘tremendous though unpalatable and unrelenting sense that this tragedy has to stop. Shakespeare is saying “There is no God” whereas the greatest pentameter ever written is “Never, never, never, never, never.”‘
The meaning was plain. Lear is mastered by passion: ‘Wrath leadeth shame on a leash.’ The tragedy is that of being misled by flattery, for the flatterer always says and does what will give pleasure, but the friend (in this case the loving daughter Cordelia) does not hesitate to give pain, offer a rebuke or correction. It was an uneasy challenge for Ian, dependent as he was on his court or inner family of actors, as for them he could do no wrong. Led by Sean Mathias, there was David Foxxe, a veteran Canadian actor, and younger acolytes who formed this circle. Sean said in 1994 to the Telegraph Magazine: ‘Our relationship is different but for the most part better than it has ever been. Ian has been a private and a public ally and there have been times when we’ve counted on each other for that kind of allegiance. He is very loyal. One of my closest friends in the whole world. In fact he’s more than that, he’s surrogate family.’