‘You cannot escape the drudgery of comparing yourself to your peers’
Unknown
Ian always repeated that he had two Oscar nominations, but sometimes this morphed into ‘two Oscars’, once at least in the Daily Telegraph. He paired up with Patrick Stewart, who is now his second acting other half, or one might say default spouse, for a revival of Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Ian claimed that the first production of this play, written specifically as a vehicle for Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, could never be bettered. The pair were reluctantly drawn into it when he and Stewart had a read-through of the script with Mathias in New York and persuaded themselves, rather easily it seemed. As more theatre of the unsaid, it was a natural progression or sequel to Waiting for Godot.
There was another read-through in London, albeit a more fluid one. Evgeny Lebedev, the Moscow-born owner of four London newspapers including the Evening Standard and the Independent, who holds British citizenship and attended Holland Park comprehensive and Mill Hill, had by now McKellen and Mathias in his wide social circle, and he was keen to be included in this project. Evgeny is a perfectionist with enterprises in journalism and the arts. This had brought him into the McKellen and Nicholas Hytner world. He had loved the theatre from an early age, and with his wide-ranging talents, which included playing the cello, had met up with Mathias who was introducing the ‘inscrutable Hackney playwright Pinter’ to Lebedev.
Their read-through as an exercise fairly quickly, in his words, ‘morphed from rehearsal to drinking game’. In Lebedev’s account, ‘Matching the characters, drink for drink, is not the easiest of tasks, particularly when you’re the alcoholic Hirst to Sean’s poet Spooner. Hirst, it cannot be denied, knows how to drink, but he does so most improperly, starting off with whisky, then moving on to vodka, then champagne and finally beer.’
It opened at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End in late 2016 after having run on Broadway with Godot and toured the UK. The pair’s two minders, Briggs and Foster, were played by Owen Teale and Damien Molony. No Man’s Land takes place in Hirst’s Hampstead mansion, where Foster and Briggs, in Hirst’s employ, alternate abuse and serving the pair while they drink. Hirst (Stewart) bickers and banters with Spooner (McKellen). Ian joked about the chair-bound nature of the role after Stewart played Professor X in X-Men: ‘Patrick is great at sedentary roles.’
Following on the rather careful, politically correct vocabulary of Vicious, sanitised for the American TV audience, No Man’s Land is by contrast loaded with Pinter’s most vituperative and dark vocabulary.
This whole production and the actors’ performances, after its sell-out run at the Cort Theatre in New York, were among the most fêted that the pair has ever given, with Paul Taylor in the Independent calling it ‘the funniest account of the play I have seen’. The audience roared. They captured the times and the Times. Where is it all going? The answer could well be No Man’s Land.
They are the Dud and Pete of their era, the duo scoring wittily off each other, pursuing non-sequiturs and shocking diversions, possibly in the 1960s and 1970s Cambridge Footlights tradition – ‘At times the writing borders on sketch-show silliness,’ noted Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph – but taken over and pushed to its extreme by Pinter, the master of threat and inconsequential menace. He knew when to stab the audience, vulnerable and exposed by a laughter-provoking line, effectively with his own brand of psychological loneliness and bullying.
Both this and its sister play Godot – ‘profoundly and essentially bourgeois’, Jean-Paul Sartre called Godot – had ended up in McKellen’s hands attaining the status of high culture as great crowd-pleasers. Decadence, despair and cynical back-biting comfort well-heeled audiences sitting in expensive seats as long as they can laugh and dispel serious reflection by being taken ‘out of their minds’. It was just the right time for Sean Mathias’s transposition of the play into the post-fact or ‘fake news’ era, when it was assumed the nexus with reality had gone, and we were plunged into a roller-coaster of imperiousness and terrified bewilderment (Stewart as Hirst), and the hilariously tragi-comic Spooner (McKellen). ‘I was sped along by gales of laughter’ was the general verdict, especially for the expletives ‘cunt!’ and ‘fuck’ – an ironic underscoring of what Spooner says: ‘All we have left is the English language.’
For Spooner, McKellen used every possible trick in his pyrotechnics of business, playing him as a raffishly determined gay man of his era. There was little balance, no equal weight between Spooner and Hirst, although I found Stewart was perfectly competent and steady. When Spooner makes a game of drinking champagne – ‘I am drinking champagne’ – McKellen stretched this out to eternity, swilling it round his throat, tasting, then swallowing it. My seat was in the middle of the front row. As Ian’s practice is to single out members of the audience on to whom to fix his gaze, I sank as low as possible and turned my head away twice so that he wouldn’t notice me. McKellen was unashamedly playing the audience for laughs. In the matinee performance at Wyndham’s to which I went, the two biggest (nervous?) laughs came when Foster says, ‘I’m not a cunt,’ and secondly when Briggs says, ‘What the fuck are you talking about … he’s a … fucking shit cake baker.’
‘I haven’t ever been loved; from this I draw my strength,’ was the line I remembered most. It was perhaps slightly sloppy persiflage, an extended laugh-a-minute sketch performed by celebrity actors, a recycled vehicle for bravura and pyrotechnical display of fragmented thought, vapid and numinous inconsequentiality. The ghosts of Sophocles and Aeschylus would turn in their amphitheatre graves at Pinter’s darkness, his relativism and, above all, his situationism. But maybe the actors were not happy too, and it was an ‘off day’. To be live, as in ‘live theatre’, can mean unpredictable. This example of cultural populism seemed too often to undermine the Pinter message, while much of the menace went missing in the overlit set. Susannah Clapp called the production ‘lacklustre’ in the Observer.
Evgeny Lebedev and Sean Mathias had drunk on at their initial reading as they matched Spooner and Hirst in drink for drink, although, as Lebedev wittily pointed out, out-Pintering Pinter in going from whisky, vodka, champagne, then to beer. ‘It goes completely against the old Russian wisdom about never reducing your alcohol percentage as the night goes on. But still, I think Welshman Sean was more drunk than me at the end.’
I am all for ‘old Russian wisdom’.
Lebedev, Mathias and McKellen had ‘a natural’, even Pinteresque ‘synergy’, which came together in yet another lasting venture. Sean suggested in 2011 the trio buy The Grapes. When Mathias, who was living with his spouse Paul de Lange, had told Ian two years before his plan to move back to the home he owned next to Ian, McKellen had apparently responded: ‘That’s wonderful. Would you like to buy a pub as well?’ Mathias, ruefully noting that Ian would get the pub into any conversation he could, reported that he could see Paul thinking, ‘I would love to run that pub,’ and felt like a ‘trapped little fox’ between them. De Lange, a qualified hotelier, took on the running of it. Lebedev became part-owner. Ian declared that he’d never been much of a pub-goer, even after shows at Stratford: ‘Not part of my life. I’m not a pub-goer at all. No! I don’t find any joy in just sitting there drinking.’ He did enjoy doing the Monday-night pub quiz, remarking with usual self-deprecation, ‘No, I am absolutely appalling! Thank God I am in a team of people. I went in to do the quiz last night and I forgot to book myself a table. Had to retire to my house and order fish and chips from the pub and bring it home. Couldn’t get into my own pub!’ At Christmas he is guaranteed a seat because he is the quiz master and sets the questions.
He was now the height of fashion in public, always wearing something different and noticeable, whether it was the rainbow-coloured bootlaces, matching the ribbon on his straw boater as he stretches out his legs, or the complicated boots themselves, skinny jeans, a tightish shirt, and bright herringbone jacket (three sizes too small, as fashion demands). Into this he has now evolved or flowered from the duffel-coated homely Northerner of Cambridge days.
But did the final Pinter, the final Lear to come, mean the line was being drawn under the Cambridge or Oxbridge dominance of the stage and films since Peter Hall first directed Waiting for Godot? Perhaps Hall’s death in September 2017 was really the end of an era of that Marlowe Society–Gielgud–Olivier domination of the classical stage with a whole different set of values from those of McKellen’s final acting years.
Ian played a cognitively deductive and impressively tender Sherlock Holmes in a new film in 2014. His Sherlock is aged ninety-four and flashbacking to his sixties to reassemble memories. It certainly set up Freudian overtones when Ian was searchingly questioned once more by Appleyard. Ian told him he was looking at some photographs – they were of his young parents – and thinking, ‘She would never see me grow up, and neither of them knew she’d [his mother] got breast cancer, they’d no idea what the future was, and they looked so happy and beautiful. I have an emotional response to it. I’ve got some letters from my father to my stepmother, and I don’t think I will be able to read them.’
He was asked finally about his legacy as a campaigner for gay rights. ‘I’ve always been a bit shy,’ he responded, ‘and I’ve always supposed that what appealed to me about acting was that I could stand up in public and draw attention to myself and not feel shy, because I was protected by the fact that I knew what the next line was.’ There had been some dispute about this childhood shyness. Cousin Margaret had said he was, in fact, a show-off. ‘But does it matter now that she says I was a little show-off, and I think that I was shy?’
Would remembrance, as with Freud, now be ‘a professional necessity’? By the age of seventy-eight, he once again pronounced on how impossible he had found the idea of writing a memoir. He had been stumped by the task of understanding his beginning, he told Louis Wise of the Sunday Times, and that he got so upset thinking about those two young parents of his who must have seen the war coming.
‘I can’t ask them about it. I would like to be their witness, and I can’t be, and I thought, “I’m not going to be able to get through this book,” and I gave up. I was getting too emotionally upset that I hadn’t been a good enough child, because I’d not shown enough interest in them.’
Is accessing deep emotion the hardest thing for him? asked his interlocutor.
‘Yes, it is. It’s a big failing, that.’
Cambridge’s influence was still vibrantly potent, with McKellen coming back to his greatest-ever stage performance as Lear, first at the small Minerva Theatre, Chichester, in 2017, then in its transfer to the Duke of York’s in 2018. And so we return to our beginnings, to the Cambridge ADC and its formative seating to Nunn’s Courtyard, and we come full circle in this final undertaking.