‘Naked I was sent back – for a brief time, until my task is done. And naked I lay upon the mountain-top. The tower behind was crumbled into dust, the window gone; the ruined stair was choked with burned and broken stone. I was alone, forgotten, without escape upon the hard horn of the world. There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over…’
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
Patrick Stewart and Ian had become such good friends that in 2013 McKellen officiated at a church ceremony at Stewart’s wedding to his third wife, the singer and songwriter Sunny Ozell. (He has two children by his first wife, Sheila Falconer. His second wife was the TV and film producer Wendy Neuss.) Since that wedding McKellen has had other requests to marry people. ‘I was offered one and a half million dollars to marry a famous couple in California, which I would perhaps have considered doing but I had to go dressed as Gandalf. So I said, “I am sorry, Gandalf doesn’t do weddings.”‘ This was Sean Parker, Silicon Village’s $2.4 billionaire, first president of Facebook.
In 2017 the second temptation to play Lear could no longer be resisted. Unfinished business again. Friends suggested he have another go. The previous production rankled – so much that when it opened he not very tactfully rang Nunn, asking him, ‘Have you seen the Chichester production?’ ‘Fuck. No,’ answered Nunn. ‘I’m not going to see it – or in London.’
‘I hope you understand I wanted to do it in a small theatre.’
One critic, Patrick Marmion, early in the run, was not too happy: ‘So persuasive is the whiskery grandfather of the British stage that he seemed to me to be struggling with his lines, creating the sort of anxiety that comes with being around old people who you fear might fall over. It’s not at all comfortable to watch, and when Sir Ian’s Lear pauses or hovers in his lines, you get the uneasy sense of a mind adrift.’ Here it would seem there was a sense of Lear ‘occupying a parallel universe’, the defining feature less of a determination to disrobe and more the pathos of a lonely, frightened old man slipping into the oblivion of dementia.
There have been in the past seven years three Lears at Chichester. Jonathan Munby’s staging on a red-carpeted circular open stage onto which characters empty out of fortress doors, reinforced by explosions of musique concrète sound, had a fluidity of style and integrity of effect that never wavered, but sometimes overstepped the mark. For example, the elevation of disgraced Kent in a cage yanked high above the stage was frankly absurd, while the abattoir setting for the hovel/ruin with pigs’ heads and carcasses’ – ‘Let us anatomise Regan to find what breeds around her heart’ – which doubles for Gloucester’s blinding scene, jarred too graphically. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty warred against the fine abstract evocation of Edgar and Gloucester on Dover’s Cliffs, when the red disc floor turned to barren chalk.
McKellen’s second bite at the Lear apple was in strong contrast to the more rhetorical and far less successful Trevor Nunn production ten years before. This had pulled every kind of lever to elevate it to the heroic Olivier level. The reading was more patently a tragedy of wrath and revenge over the infamy of self-esteem with ‘showy’ (Ian’s word) displays and bravura theatricality, but now we could even dismiss the ‘waving of Gandalf’s wand’ as part of the sexual rhetoric. This time it became, in the parallel stories of Lear and Gloucester, a tragedy of declining years and old age, in which their folly lies in the evil they bring upon themselves, and they learn, or become sufficiently aware of, to regret and atone for it.
I had not thought from the first few moments that it was going to turn out so. For in the opening scene, overlooked by McKellen’s bemedalled and trim-bearded portrait, such as you would find of monarchs in Buckingham Palace, Lear entered alone, walked downstage to front stage, and eyeballing the audience from left to right seemed to be throwing down the gauntlet with, ‘I am Ian McKellen playing you, my audience.’ The scene’s tableau that followed by comparison shrank to actors on a stage playing their objective roles in King Lear. The deposition scene when Lear gives away his kingdom is always a tricky one and was confused here by Goneril standing in front of Lear at the table while he made much play of cutting up a map of Britain with scissors. The large map segments, although meant symbolically, were at odds with Lear’s later insistence of fifty, then twenty-five retainers, as he battled with Regan and Goneril. The anger was muted. McKellen played the almost stereotypical gruff old man character with a high voice filtered through whiskers. It did not have the sudden, inciting flare-up to set alight the chaos of passion Lear unleashes. But subsequently, when Lear is moved into and through his wheel of fire, the self-inflicted humiliation, with at first little if no soul-exposure or affecting vulnerability, it did grow into a great acting performance with every detail from the outside thought out and well-placed. Ian brought beautiful blow-by-blow detail to every word, gesture, inclination and movement as he told us about Lear’s mental decline. This was his masterclass in versatility and range of effect, but quite often in the performance I felt I was watching one well-interpreted and calculated effect following another, rather than actually being taken inside and shown it, so the suspension of disbelief did not quite work.
Even so, the conversational level at which the whole of Munby’s production was pitched succeeded in bringing clarity and lucidity to the three hours and forty minutes, coaxing thoughtful rumination and modern association from every scene. One especial example was the ‘girlie’ affection between Regan and Goneril, the rapturous hissing and cheek-smacking kisses almost to the very last moment when they are killing each other, which pointed to our contemporary hollowness of love and affection through social media. The way Regan stripped herself in sexual display, as well as her hysterical delight over Gloucester’s blinding, struck me as another telling stab at our double standards. I stopped short of applauding the casting of Sinéad Cusack as Kent, ‘an achingly trendy bit of gender-blind casting’, as one critic called it, which added nothing except political correctness. Kent’s lines and description in the eyes of others contradict it. The way she embraced Cordelia was inappropriate ‘sisterhood’ stuff, her vocal disguise as an Irish scallywag frankly absurd. Still, this removal of the outer husk of Kent’s maleness did not wholly detract from Cusack’s (and Kent’s) tender expression of love and loyalty, which she managed well, without the contrasting gruffness. The ‘gender bending’ was not a total disfigurement. ‘[It’s] all right for people who do not know the play to fulfil the woman quota,’ said Ronald Pickup.
Overall, this achievement of Ian’s over the play’s exhausting length was colossal and at the age of seventy-eight, hardly matched by any living actor. It put the theatre, the stage actor, at the front of acting excellence, as he or she should be. It was supreme, and while I would claim the same of Jacobi’s Lear in terms of a different interpretive mastery of the love and redemption at the centre of this play, and its universal theme of spiritual forgiveness, Ian’s equal, more secular reading of this demanding text achieved a very different power.
These actors, in their sere and yellow leaf, were equal firsts. Both came just as near to contradicting Charles Lamb’s criticism that ‘The Lear of Sh. [sic] cannot be acted’ as is possible. ‘The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension,’ Lamb had written, ‘but in intellectual; the explosions of his passing are terrible as a volcano, they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.’
McKellen’s performance disclosed to the very depth Lear’s mind, showing how that mind ‘was laid bare’. McKellen brought together disparate if not contradictory elements in himself and his acting, to which often he had surrendered, and even extended, to overcome those shadow ghosts of unfinished family business.
Specifically, in the gesture he made of turning round Cordelia’s body in the final moments before he expires, he enfolded and embraced her with a new confidence and freedom, and with a complete, unconditional love he could not give her before – because of his pride and ego, and his insistence on being obeyed. In this unifying performance he had with subtlety, delicacy and enviable control laid bare his own mind, to give us a reading with which the audience identified. My fear, on his first entrance, of histrionic intimidation of the audience, melted in favour of submission, in the deftly chosen intimate space of the Minerva, to an inspired exploration of, in Lamb’s words, the ‘vast riches’ of Lear’s intellectual greatness. And so the two sides of Ian McKellen were healed nightly in this extraordinary way. He was unabashed at the success, posting on Twitter the Standard‘s rapturous praise: ‘Ian McKellen’s intelligent performance is a triumph’ – repeating his dismissal of ‘Trevor Nunn’s vehemently operatic production for the RSC’.
‘Intelligent’ was the key word. ‘Strikingly conversational’, the paper’s critic Henry Hitchings called it. I heard later that in the middle of the play when he was off-stage McKellen took a forty-five-minute nap. And every night he took a motorcycle taxi to the Duke of York’s Theatre, where it had transferred from Chichester for a hundred days in the West End.
‘Do you want to know my secret?’ asked the world-famous Indian seer and philosopher Krishnamurti before a packed audience. ‘This is my secret.’ He then answered the question: ‘I don’t mind what happens.’ Could this be true of McKellen? This ultimate ‘surrender’ to compassion had also something very unexpected about it yet had always been there on the horizon. The climax of his acting life had been reached and triumphantly passed. There needed to be no regret, for nothing remained unachieved. There would be no looking back.