‘Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats’
Victor Hugo
Turning now from the sublime to the ridiculous: during the storm scenes of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the United Kingdom and its subsequent world tour of 2007, Ian McKellen stripped to the buff 345 times. He had a track record for baring all in King Lear as Edgar before he played the eponymous role. Fellow member of the Actors’ Company Margery Mason had seriously not approved, and was shocked at him suddenly taking off his clothes in the ‘Poor Tom’s a cold’ scenes. At that time he was celebrated as a schoolgirls’ Shakespearean heart-throb. When questioned about the first week’s school booking at Wimbledon, McKellen, reported as being thirty-two (in 1974, he was nearly thirty-five), riposted that the nude scene was ‘symbolic’. He could not see why hundreds of teenage girls should be upset, for it was in keeping with the production and the setting. The audience took little notice, and reactions were pretty passive, but one night a voice in the Wimbledon audience was heard to utter: ‘Ummmmm, nice one, Cyril!’ Germaine Greer later in her Guardian review of King Lear recalled that McKellen had said, ‘This was a simple image to counterpoint the impenetrable obscurity of Edgar’s language.’ Greer took great exception in McKellen’s ‘bland assumption that Shakespeare’s language is impenetrable’.
At the final run-through of the 2007 Lear in a Clapham rehearsal room, Ian first revealed to the cast and director Trevor Nunn (who must be held complicit) his ‘member’, as Weston refers tactfully to it. Nunn defended it: ‘First seeing Poor Tom all his awareness of the “poor forked” animal is justification enough.’ Yet it was to assume greater attention than anything else.
McKellen in Clapham first bared all on the line, ‘O reason not the need’. His understudy noted his magnificent manhood dangling ‘in the dusty Clapham air’, while the female heads of department averted their eyes. Weston realised his own place in the pecking order, saying, ‘Sir Ian’s part is much bigger than mine.’
Rehearsals were not happy, and during their first run-through, in their rehearsal room before opening at the Courtyard, Stratford, Ian showed exhaustion and voiced dissatisfaction with himself. At the end of the play when Ian straddled over Romola Garai as the dead Cordelia, he farted loudly and declared, as if commenting on himself, ‘This is the first truthful thing I’ve seen in your performance.’
When Lahr came to see Lear at Stratford in 2007 before it came to New York, he recounts how he went out on a McKellen ‘post-prandial shindig’ for his fellow actors. He described how Francis Barber acted out her version of McKellen and Nunn at work, ‘as McKellen leaned against the wall, smiling. “Trevor, I would like more thunder on that line.” “I think, Ian, that it’s a half line, and you can do it without thunder.” “No, but, Trevor, I would like some thunder at—” “Ian, Shakespeare was not a meteorologist.” “We’re aware of that, Trevor, but I would like—” “I’ve given you dogs. I’ve given you thunder. I have given you every sound effect that Shakespeare has told us to give you … Please shut up and do the scene.” Then, turning to nod in McKellen’s direction, Barber went on, “and he says to me, ‘He really is a fat-assed bastard!’”
When they began previews in April, Ian went out to the Dirty Duck, the pub near the theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, after every performance, apparently because he had to unwind. Weston noticed also Ian’s constant changes of the textual inflections, trying himself to keep up with them. It was the full exposure that began to become the theme of the production in the public domain. The Daily Mirror picked up on it at the first preview on 7 May. Mentioning Ian’s hair dyed a pure white (‘Lear the White’ as opposed to ‘Gandalf the Grey’), it proclaimed that as ‘Gandalf waves his wand’, pointing at some members of the audience a few older people but mostly teenaged school-trippers, were shocked as they hadn’t been warned. Germaine Greer hailed the ‘full beauty of this sublime coup de théâtre‘, the display of McKellen’s ‘impressive genitalia’ as ‘perverse as anything Trevor Nunn has ever done’, replete with inexplicable dumb shows in which the Fool is hanged on stage, ‘hoisted aloft … feebly jerking as if to suggest his neck has been broken.’ Overall, though, Greer dished out what was probably the most scathing review McKellen ever had, finding him ‘as irritating as any fractious, befuddled, sclerotic old bugger you’ve ever met … such virtuoso caricature makes sympathy impossible.’
Ian found her article deeply hurtful and perused it for tips and ‘anything I can put right’. She had criticised the shaking of his hands, and he admitted she was ‘sort of right’ – and gave the excuse that he was working in this alien theatre and wanted everybody to see ‘a theatrical gesture for a theatrical space’. He ‘amends’ the wobbly hand. He went on with excuses – his neck impedes the voice when he’s angry, and pointed to his own tendency to give them a show: it was all about making effects.
Quick to exploit and yet down-pedal the publicity, the RSC put up a sign outside saying the production contained gunshots, strobe lighting and a ‘glimpse’ of ‘male nudity’, echoing Kenneth Clark’s distinction between the ‘naked’ and the ‘nude’ – its artistic transformation. Spinning out of control, the drama leapt with a bound into high entertainment as the Guardian invited readers to post comments and printed nine derogatory reviews out of ten. The perfect cause célèbre was born!
The press was not yet allowed to review because Frances Barber as Goneril had injured herself. The critics, like usurped miniature King Lears, grumbled about their exclusion, until in June Michael Billington was invited to redress the balance, when he saluted ‘McKellen’s moving, majestic Lear’ – but even Michael could not resist – ‘uncovers a naked humanity.’ He took a swipe at Greer: ‘Only those with dirty minds will be dismayed by McKellen’s nudity.’
As Gloucester’s line ‘We have seen the best of our times’ went on gathering momentum, the farce could have been written by Aristophanes. That ‘the member is the message’ became the repeated ‘soundbite’, the top ‘news’ story on McKellen.
The press night had been delayed because Frances had to have a knee operation. The controversy heated up. Ian waded in to refute the adverse criticism. The production started to become a litany of mishaps and flat performances, with Trevor giving the cast endless notes. He was personally attacked by critics and then publicly defended by his wife Imogen Stubbs. It clearly still rankles, as he told me in 2018: ‘Charles Spencer was maybe mean-spirited when he wrote, “Trevor Nunn is a talented director but an appalling human being.”‘
Gradually they won some good reviews and the production’s sales filled, as it prepared to take off on its year-long world tour. Ian received plaudits for his ‘breathtaking performance’ when in Newcastle.
In spite of the setbacks McKellen received rapturous ovations, but doubts inevitably seemed to pursue him. In New York he complained, ‘It’s a fucking hard part. It looks easy, but it’s a fucking hard part.’ One arresting accolade came from Ben Brantley in the New York Times. Although he called the production popcorn, ‘heightened costume drama sped along with adventure-style movie music, replete with black-hearted snarling villains’, he found that ‘one of the marvels of Mr McKellen’s performance is its suggestion that a so-called second childhood can be as rich an educational process as the first … By tortured degrees … this Lear arrives into ‘a pained resignation that comes with facing the nothingness into which all men descend.’
In Minneapolis, says Weston in his diary, ‘everything falls apart’, and showed perhaps this underlying insecurity in Ian’s performance. Maybe this fragmented, many-sided Lear, full of effects and poignant personal exposure had all been too much for him. By the final performance in Minneapolis he was roaming like a hungry old wolf, more angry than the cast had seen him before on the tour, using his anger to inject energy into his performance.
Monica Dolan as Regan put on her character’s usual sneering manner, but Ian snapped and positively snarled at her, and with his contempt boiling over, ‘slightly pushes’ her, as Weston put it. Philip Winchester, who played Edmund the bastard, took umbrage, along with others in the cast. They complained to the Equity representative. After the episode Weston went to Ian and found him alone and distraught, and ‘he looks at me like a hurt little boy with his eyes: “The whole company is against me. They say I have behaved badly.”‘
Weston pledged unswerving support, claiming that great actors should be given some leeway. ‘I saw what he did. It was just a push. Nobody would be here without Ian.’ Culpable or innocent as he may have been (and he was defended hotly by Francis Barber), it was evident that Ian by now had lost his cool and did not quite know what to do to rectify matters. ‘It all appears to be falling apart at the seams,’ moaned Weston. If only for a moment or two McKellen relinquised the commanding officer’s steely control. His perfectibility and his serene sense of having energy and control in reserve had departed.
I am not convinced by Ian’s magisterial assessment to John Lahr of his performance on tour: ‘In a sense Lear is the apotheosis of McKellen’s hard-won authenticity.’ Parallel with the ongoing triumph of the performance on tour, his naked display continued to raise its head, notably in Singapore when he was not allowed to reveal what the local press called his ‘big boy’. Far East audiences had to be over twenty-one to witness such a treat (not like Surrey schoolgirls). The Straits Times went to the heart of the matter: ‘McKellen will not shed all here; but due to an agreement between the RSC and SRT [Singapore Repertory Theatre] … will wear underpants.’ When asked to comment on the local ban on homosexual acts, he said he felt rather guilty calling it, ‘a law left over from British rule’. Typical Ian dig!
New York rose to its feet with Ian’s tackle restored and with a lot of gay men in the front rows. But by the time they reached Minneapolis and the episode with Regan, the ‘saga of Ian’s mighty cock’ had become somewhat old hat. Local radio called attention to the advice ‘Sir Ian’s Lear ignoreth: “Have more than thou showest,”‘ Anne Tennant, a regular of FM107, who usually discussed trends in celebrity plastic surgery, complained: ‘He’s on the stage thrust … right there in the faces of the local blue bloods with famous names who sit in the front row of every opening night. He is probably the greatest Shakespearean actor we’ve got and he completely derailed the climax of King Lear by exposing himself. And not only does he expose himself but when he pulls his shift up, he does a 360.’ Ms Tennant went on to admit he was considerably better endowed than anyone she had ever met in her bedroom career. She thought Ian was ‘nowhere near’ relaxed about it. While ‘Lear has lost his sovereignty over not just his kingdom but over his mind, what we had was the sovereignty of Sir Richard.’ Sir Richard was not the name she used on the radio station.
Was McKellen making this gesture as Lear to the elements or to the public? In the 1980s aged naked men in the gentlemen’s bathing section on the bank of the River Cherwell in Oxford used to flaunt their wares to the view of passing punts. Did Ian see Lear as part of that tradition? Modern Western culture was certainly dominated by considerations and demonstrations at every level of sexuality. Sigmund Freud conceptualised the penis as a means not only to unlock everyone’s private history, but also that of the whole human race. For Freud it was ‘the powerful, the creative, the intellectual, and the beautiful, as well as the ugly, the irrational, and the beast within us all’.
Ian himself would have issued a massive yet modest disclaimer to this contention, but perhaps it was not hard to see why Lear’s full-frontal exposure came to attain an importance that Ian hadn’t intended. Was it right to view this as a defining gesture, reinforcing and empowering gay activists and the political side of McKellen’s personality? In the social and historical climate of our day, with the general loosening of taboos, its point could not be not lost.
Jacobi, before he played Lear in Michael Grandage’s 2012 production, said to Toby Robertson, ‘I’m not going to do as Ian did. It was ridiculous. I timed it. Ian peeled off his top and it was such a long time, about a minute, and all this time you were left staring – it was totally ridiculous.’ But also what a laugh. ‘Oh yes! A very large widdle-waddle,’ comments a close friend who has known McKellen all his life. ‘It just goes upwards and doesn’t extend. It’s fat and gusty. He’s very fond of it and doesn’t mind exposing it!’
The decision to strip naked will long be remembered, remaining as much as any other single act in his life a famous moment. This narrative of the Lear tour exposes the age’s double standards (in other words, we are all grown up, aren’t we, as not to be put off by a bit of naked cock, on the other hand we can’t stop talking about it). Whatever arguments may be put forward in defence or attack, or justified as art, such exposure was an influential display of power and threat.
During its year of performances Lear grew and grew in what was now time-honoured McKellen practice. It reached its peak on the return to London at the New London Theatre. In mid-November Nunn rallied his cast for the final straight and they held a twelve-hour technical rehearsal. He gently coaxed Monica into adjusting her performance in the first half of the ‘reason not the need’ scene. He likewise told Romola she must look at him after he wakes up. ‘She complies without a murmur and immediately, to my mind, the scene becomes more moving,’ observed Weston. Some of the cast baulked at more rehearsal and Nunn lost his temper and asked Jonathan Hyde (Kent) if he wanted to direct the play. Ian remained very quiet during this ruckus. Weston commented, ‘I wish the two of them would stand together; it would solve many problems. Trevor stands firm.’
Sean Mathias was still a close and important part of Ian’s entourage. Weston reported an earlier episode indicative of Mathias’s adverse opinion, when he and his wife had been invited to have a drink on 26 May at the Dirty Duck with Ian after one show. On this night Mathias saw Lear for the first time, and he and Ian stayed so long in the dressing room afterwards that David and his wife decided not to wait. Ian apologised profusely for not turning up, but at the next performance as Lear he was very flat, which Weston believed may well have been due to Mathias giving him notes on his performance, in other words being highly critical of it.
Benedict Nightingale’s review more than others picked out when and where McKellen’s performance showed the man behind the performance, and how he managed by the end of the run to bring out the whole complex and complicated nature of his being as a match and in accord with what Shakespeare was saying.
This doddering ruler [wrote Nightingale] is cut off from people, children, reality and himself – and will make a journey more extreme and spiritually instructive than Czar Nicholas II’s. Here is the McKellen lifelong mantra, extreme and spiritually instructive … He promises not to weep, then does so. He promises patience, then rages.
‘Its centre is Lear’s question: ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ At the time the white-bearded king is putting a stool on trial in the belief that it’s his daughter Goneril. But McKellen delivers the line gently and quietly and lingers over the word ‘hearts’ in a wondering, interrogative way, as if belatedly discovering that such an organ exists – and exists in him … Always you’re aware of Lear’s contradictions.
Sam Mendes, theatre director and James Bond film director, asks every actor who works for him, ‘Who do you do it for?’ Applying Mendes’s question to McKellen, then speculating on an answer, I think it could be that he was looking in Lear for himself, and not in himself for Lear. Was he then ultimately doing it for himself?
Derek Jacobi and his director Michael Grandage’s later approach to King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre was very different from Nunn and McKellen’s. They heavily cut the text, simplifying some of the complications and the protracted Gloucester scenes. Orwell had a point when he said it is not a very good play, apart from its greatness of language and spirit, considered just as a play. ‘It is too drawn out and has too many characters and subplots.’
‘Sir Derek Jacobi’s extraordinary turn in the title role of King Lear at the Donmar Theatre in London is turning out to be something of an acting master-class,’ wrote the Sunday Telegraph‘s man in the stalls, adding that Jacobi was a lot better in the role than Sir Ian McKellen had been a few years earlier. I cannot imagine this report going down well with Ian. He also reported sportingly that an associate of Sir Ian assured him that ‘the actor expects to get along to pay homage, too, within the next week or so’. An ‘associate’ of Sir Ian? Had he become so grand as to have a spin doctor? An informant tells me that McKellen, when he did go along to see it, was very scathing about it, so the jealous sense of rivalry with Jacobi must have hit him deeply.
It surely became an important part of his motivation to perform Lear again at Chichester in 2017. Later he was to dismiss this 2007 performance of his as ‘a wistful presence [so he called it] at the heart of Trevor Nunn’s vehemently operatic production for the RSC’.