‘As lives, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly Parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.’
Andrew Marvell
The differences between McKellen and Jacobi, the two great classical actors of their Cambridge generation, will fascinate theatre historians in the future. Thea Sharrock, the director, summed them up:
They are like chalk and cheese. Ian never has the hands-on attention and loving care that Derek has with a part, nor indeed does he have the technical perfection of an actor that Derek has … [He] is a much more formal type and tends to hold forth when you meet him first … Ian is not someone who is immediately on your wavelength. I have a sense that Ian is much more of an improviser, he will experiment and change fluently his performance in unexpected ways. Derek on the other hand has to have everything perfectly prepared beforehand, so everything he does is solid and securely worked out. He is the perfect craftsman.
In 2012 they appeared together in a sitcom series, Vicious.
If in Ian is the DNA of the Nonconformist campaigner and the touring actor, in Derek is the DNA of the Prussian shoemaker craftsman and the Versailles aristocrat imprisoned for his Protestant beliefs. McKellen said of Derek and himself:
The trouble is we are too alike, we are the same age, we have exactly the same background – we’re the same sort of person, and whether we are both being gay has anything to do with it, I don’t know, but if you look at our careers we have played an awful lot of the same parts. Both [have] had successes on Broadway. If our names were more similar I think people would be constantly confusing us. Initially he played Edward the Second at Cambridge, which got him going, and then I played Edward the Second professionally, which is what got me going. We’ve both done Vanya, both done Richard the Second, both done Hamlet then King Lear …
Jacobi almost counter-commented:
We have always been close but never intimate. I admired him as an actor, first as Shallow which was marvellous, and I always saw him as a character actor, saw him not as himself but as someone else. Not confident as a face (blond and blue-eyed) he was handsome in his way, but not a great looker, and I was never a great looker either. At Cambridge he wasn’t that outgoing, a little introverted, his own man. I find him very funny, he has great humour, a great companion. He was much closer to Trevor Nunn, who was more his contemporary.
They have never fallen out, though they sometimes perhaps like to wind each other up. Ian once bought a T-shirt with Derek’s image as Macbeth in a tea-shop in Stratford and put it on to tease Derek who had not exactly been a riotous success.
‘I think we’re both’, said Ian, ‘allowed to send each other up as we both know what we’re up to.’
When Derek praised him as Twankey, Ian replied: ‘What about the Ugly Sisters?’ Neither could imagine the other not working.
At one time, staying with Derek and his partner Richard in France, Ian was sent off to pick some sunflowers before the expected arrival of Derek and Richard’s guests. Frances Barber, ever faithful to both, was there too. Ian had to climb through a fence to get the flowers. Derek was nervous of what the local farmer would say. He initially helped Ian, but when he turned back to him in the fields with an armful of flowers Derek had disappeared. ‘Well, fair enough, he did have to live there, and would have to deal with an irate farmer if he came along. I’m sure Frankie [Barber] blew that up into a huge tale of comic caricature and proportions. Frankie would caricature Derek as being very, very nervous, and me as carefree and showing off. Probably there’s a touch of truth in that I suppose. I’m much more of a self-publicist than Derek.’
He and Derek came tantalisingly close to acting together in a Peter Shaffer play about Tchaikovsky, according to Allison Pearson. Jacobi loved the idea, which Shaffer told him about over lunch in New York where Jacobi was appearing as Lear. Ian fell in with the idea, ready, as he had done Amadeus, to take the play on trust. ‘Four Cambridge lads,’ he murmured approvingly to me. Derek was to play Tchaikovsky, and Ian his brother Modest; he was enthusiastic about what a wonderful story it was, and had written the first two acts, but had a problem with the third. He wouldn’t exactly tell Derek what that problem was, but his great revelation was about the mystery of the composer, namely his death in 1893 from cholera and how he caught it.
Now the two main ideas were either, first, that he knew cholera was raging in the city at that time, and deliberately drank a glass of water, knowing it would kill him – so it was suicide. Or, he drank it by accident, without knowing it would kill him. But, according to Alexander Poznansky, one of the biographers, this was just a cover-up by Modest, who when he wrote his brother’s life concealed the gay side to maintain the romantic image. Shaffer told Derek, ‘I’ve got another solution to the mystery of the death, and this other solution is that Tchaikovsky and his brother, both being gay, both being quite promiscuous, particularly the brother…’
Peter’s solution – according to Derek it was ‘very Shaffer’ – was in a scene where he showers with a boy he has picked up and while they are in the shower he is kissing the boy, in fact he is licking the boy’s shoulder. That’s how the water gets into his system, and he gets the cholera – ‘So it’s a sexual thing … A perfect idea, very visual, emotional, it’s a wonderful image and not necessarily against the known facts.’
Derek then asked Shaffer, ‘Which is the best part, Modest or Tchaikovsky?’
Shaffer replied, ‘Well, as far as parts go, probably Modest is.’
‘Oh well, Ian will play that, Ian will want to play that!’
Modest was Oscar Wildeish, recalls Derek, much more worldly, more unpleasant certainly, but also ‘out’, flamboyant – he was obviously gay, in contrast to Tchaikovsky who concealed it and married a woman. Shaffer never finished the play. Jacobi was convinced it was in a drawer somewhere in New York. He also told Jacobi at lunch in New York – Shaffer was eighty-four and very frail – that he was working on something else, also a play, working very slowly and not sure when he would finish it. The play had a title: ‘PS‘.
It never happened. Another near-miss of working together occurred when Ian approached Derek to play another part with him. This was for the 1992 production of Uncle Vanya at the Cottesloe Theatre, in the view of some admirers the most moving performance Ian has given. On Mathias’s suggestion, Ian asked Derek to join it, offering the part of his choice, Vanya or Astrov. ‘We had it all set up. He said, “Vanya”, so I said all right, “I’ll play Astrov” and he withdrew, I can’t remember why.’
One day when I was round at Derek’s house in Belsize Park, sipping coffee and admiring his priceless collection of Staffordshire pottery, I asked what was on the cards next. He replied that Ian and he had been sent a script for a television sitcom called Vicious Old Queens, written by Mark Ravenhill (of Shopping and Fucking) and Gary Janetti, the San Francisco screenwriter. Derek hadn’t responded well to the script but said he had felt a bit miffed he had not appeared in Coronation Street, although Bella, his much-loved dog, had. He said, with tongue in cheek, he was so envious of Ian appearing: ‘Maybe my character could appear as Emily Bishop’s lodger while he’s away doing a local gig…’
The pair hummed and hawed over this new script, but ultimately Derek was convinced by Ian, who said they should work together to make the scripts better. So they agreed, with misgivings, and started rehearsing it for ITV with Frances de la Tour also picked to star. The series was heralded by weeks of hype approving the appearance of the ‘thespian heroes in the first ever sitcom about cohabiting gay men’, and ultimately aired not with its original title, Vicious Old Queens, but simply Vicious.
Stuart and Freddie are a gay couple who, after fifty years together, find that their mutual affection is matched only by their mutual contempt. They wile away hours exchanging barbs or scowling at one another from either end of their sofa, like gargoyles in cardigans. Freddie (the McKellen role) is a retired actor from Wigan whose career had peaked at killing a prostitute on Coronation Street. Stuart (Jacobi) is a former Leytonstone bartender. He still has not got around to admitting his sexuality to his mother. Together in a drab central London living room they duel in cartoonish camp, and are rather unpleasant company, for viewers as much as the handful of visitors who drop in. Foremost among these is the imperious Frances de la Tour. Neither her fellow cast members, nor the live television studio audience who cackled with laughter throughout, appeared to have noticed that the world had moved on since Leonard Rossiter and Rising Damp. As Violet, she was required to make eyes at Ash (Iwan Rheon), a young man who had moved into the flat upstairs, and ‘repeatedly trot out a feeble gag about whether Zac Efron was a person or a geographic location’ (according to the Sunday Mirror). There was the odd glimpse of how Vicious might have amounted to something sharper, as when, for example, McKellen turned to Jacobi and says, as one ageing man to another, ‘I don’t know which would be preferable at this point, if you woke up dead, or I did.’ Jacobi leaves the sliver of a pause before hissing back, ‘I know which I’d prefer.’
Even so, 5.7 million people watched. Nearly every opinion was contemptuous of the first six episodes. I was in the audience during several recordings. The interplay between cast, de la Tour, Ian and Derek, improvised and unexpected, between or during retakes, was infinitely funnier and more spontaneous than the clanking of the lines. The cascade of guffaws from the gay elderly couples in the audience, whipped up into a frenzy by the gag man who took over at every break in recording to tell lewd jokes, was embarrassing. The gag man picked on members of the audience to reveal some titillating indiscretion or risqué admission about themselves.
These first episodes were followed by six more, when the scripts did improve to some extent, and there kicked in a much-repeated phenomenon of culture and entertainment. The public’s first reaction had almost completely written off the show, but American audiences lapped it up. Money talks. Gradually the camp extravagance became a kind of acceptably carpet-slippered, if not also reassuringly soothing, pap food. Public perception switched to good, simply because the acting wore down adverse response, and the popular personalities of the performers had taken over. When they were in South Bank studios recording live, ‘The people of my generation who were in the [studio] audience were ever so chuffed to see me,’ said Frances de la Tour, putting her hand modestly on her breast. ‘I got an entrance round!’ she told John Walsh of the Independent.
Ian was in his element, twisting quite banal lines to sound like comic manna from heaven. He quite outshone his old friend who was trapped in two-dimensional camp without any real or substantial character to play. It was a contrast to Derek’s rich and rounded portrait as Anne Reid’s endless wooer in the BBC serial Last Tango in Halifax, screened at the same time. It showed how Ian could play any old rubbish and make it outlandish and riveting, but Derek, the master craftsman, had to find a real character emotionally and physically, to bring out the best. This was not to say he wasn’t an equal foil to McKellen’s extravagance, but it was only too obvious in the performance, poorly directed as it was, how thin his material was.
By the middle of 2015 Vicious had become a hit, thanks to (in the eyes of the Sun) the ‘realistic portrayal’ of Freddie and Stuart. Homosexuality was a part of everybody’s lives, as McKellen has striven for. Freddie and Stuart could legally marry. And if they did, it would be a potent symbol of a journey, or symbol of progress made. So pronounced Janetti, chatting up the audience, although Ian had been a little more circumspect. ‘Our purpose,’ he said, ‘is to make people chuckle and giggle.’ There was now the impending marriage towards the end of the second series of Jacobi and McKellen, and in the rising and repetitive hype to celebrate, Ian confessed to having had a crush on his friend (at Cambridge) while Derek said he was oblivious to it. ‘I had absolutely no idea … he kept so much to himself.’ The story, reinvented as new, did the rounds yet again.
People were, Ian conceded, rather disparaging about Vicious at first, ‘but we were gargantuan and over the top … we were playing to the studio.’ Playing to the studio as well as to the world at large, on the set, which consisted of just a huge double bed, Derek and Ian, not exactly in romantic nudity, but in appropriate and colourful night attire, consummated their earlier partnership to the standing ovation and cheers of a triumphant studio audience, which rose to its feet to applaud. ‘There is even a new series in the offing in 2019,’ says Derek, although it transpired that everyone had had enough. Marvell’s parallel lines had come together and been fused at last.