Tyrone Guthrie, known universally as Tony, the director Ian worked with first at Nottingham in December 1963, was to have a lasting impact. He had an unusual appearance for one who worked in the theatre. He was extraordinarily tall with pronounced aquiline features, penetrating eyes and a military moustache – he had an army officer’s bearing, yet one who wore shabby suits and sandshoes. In his old mackintosh he might easily have been mistaken for a farmer.
Angela Fox, mother of Edward, James and Robert, grandmother of Emilia and Laurence, and matriarch of one of the country’s most luminous acting dynasties, called him the closest and perhaps the most understanding friend she ever had, with a philosophy of ‘Rise above it’ in any trouble, and a capacity to keep everyone on their toes. His formative power over great actors’ development was legendary. Unusually for a director at that time, given a knighthood for his service to the theatre, Guthrie was a revered giant, as well as a highly eccentric individual who had a unique vision of the drama. He made pronouncements such as:
It is only theoretically impossible to separate the actor’s skill from his personality. Theoretically, then, the most skilful actor is the most protean, the actor with the widest range. It so happens, however, that the actors with the widest range do not usually go very deep … their performances [are] apt to be superficial. Some of the greatest actors have no protean quality at all. In every part, though the make-up and costume may vary, the performance is almost exactly the same.
Ian, aged twenty-four, was not too young to have this test applied to him.
Guthrie cast a lasting spell over mid-twentieth-century performers, and so much was owed by so many to him. Not least of these was Laurence Olivier, who experienced his epiphany as an actor when performing Sergius in Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson in the legendary Old Vic season of 1944. Olivier said he owed everything to Guthrie when hating the role of Sergius in Arms and the Man, considering Sergius ‘a boring little prick’. Guthrie seized on this and pointed out, ‘No, Larry, you’ve got to love him, celebrate and identify utterly with this.’ Here was the challenge or gauntlet that Guthrie threw down to every actor aspiring to rise to greatness, not least McKellen.
Guthrie directed Ian’s debut performance as Aufidius in Coriolanus in 1963, the company’s first play at the newly built Nottingham Playhouse. John Neville had the title role. The director’s approach was that consequent to Coriolanus’s mother fixation he saw Aufidius as a figure whom Coriolanus, in same-sex attraction, ‘worshipped in combat’, in the words Guthrie used in an introduction he wrote to the play, ‘and lusted after in his dreams’. As a result, a marvellous private hate exists between the rival commanders, which ranges through jealous possessiveness to open love before Aufidius turns against Coriolanus’s ingratitude and treachery.
Here, for the twenty-four-year-old actor, was the first instance of being drawn into a psycho-sexual drama of homoerotic dimension which Shakespeare clearly underlines. Guthrie was intent on bringing out this bond between Aufidius and Coriolanus and was repeating the motif of homosexual desire that he, having consulted Freud’s biographer Dr Ernest Jones, thought was inescapable between Othello and Iago when directing Ralph Richardson and Olivier in the roles in 1938 at the Old Vic. Given Ian’s aspiration to be like Laurence Olivier, there is an interesting similarity to be found here: in that production, Guthrie had wanted a climax of the Iago–Othello relationship to be fed with explicit intent, for example with, ‘I’m your own for ever,’ as a declaration of love. This ‘inescapable’ idea fell on stony ground with Richardson, ‘when I’, as Olivier said, ‘flung my arms round Ralph’s neck and kissed him, whereat Ralph sort of patted me and said, “Dear fellow, dear boy” for having lost control of myself and despising me for being a very bad actor.’
In Coriolanus the expression of explicit intent presented Ian with no problem at all, especially as Guthrie took him aside, conscious of his youth and relative inexperience, and rehearsed him privately. Extending such attention to such a relatively unknown figure was a typical Guthrie gesture; he cut away protocol at every turn and instinctively countered as much as he could the star system and leading man/leading lady axis on which the English theatre pirouetted.
Elspeth Cochrane, Ian’s agent, recalled over lunch several years after he played Aufidius, how she found Guthrie at a first night at the Bristol Old Vic in 1946, alone under just a working light before the curtain went up, sweeping the stage, whereupon Ian and she responded together, ‘He’s God.’ The hero worship by Ian – built up during rehearsals – reached the sky: ‘It’s the excitement he brings to everything. And his energy. He runs a jam factory in Ireland just to provide employment. The jam’s called Irish Orchard!’ At the Mayor’s reception for the Nottingham Playhouse’s Civic Opening, no food and drink was set aside for the cast. By the time they arrived everything had gone. Storming at this, Guthrie, ignoring royalty and the hoi polloi, entered the enclosure reserved for actors and before leaving seized a tray of gin and tonics for the company.
Ian panicked about the role at first and found difficult Guthrie’s request for him at the end of the play to utter a cry of extreme grief at having killed Coriolanus. This is before he says the lines, ‘My rage is gone, And I am struck with sorrow.’ A heartfelt lover’s cry, no less, was what Guthrie wanted. Ian was stuck trying to achieve this, even at the dress rehearsal. As Michael Crawford, playing the Second Serviceman, records, Guthrie took him downstage away from the others, quickly but loud enough for them to hear, and told him they were at the climax of a masterpiece. Guthrie’s words were, ‘Aufidius is a man but he can grow, as we all can, to behave like a god. His rage can turn to sorrow. Fill your mind, your imagination with your feelings and let your heart wail. If you can’t do it, it’s all a waste. You can.’
He tried and did it. The huge, wailing threnody, which he reached in the end, became a turning point for Ian, and he says it was then that he realised what acting was really about: ‘to reveal yourself to your audience and make them empathise with you.’ Playing Aufidius, sexually circling Coriolanus through the play, uttering threats like caresses, became the most exciting dynamic of the production, showing, as The Times said, ‘a prodigious range of hysterical passion’ and those who saw it remember it to this day. It freed Ian, gave him at an acceptable public level, possibly, for the very first time, the release physically and emotionally for his repressed homosexual passion. It gave him permission to be himself.
Ian continued to add to his experience through his Nottingham season and came up against some other rich and resplendent figures. In Peter Ustinov’s The Life in my Hands, Ian played the young man who has raped a fifteen-year-old girl with mental illness. Ustinov used this as a springboard for a discussion of capital punishment. It exposed Ian, Ustinov told Ann Leslie, to show a raw, rough quality, employing his Northern accent, which Ustinov found impressive and exciting. ‘I found him putting inflections into speeches which I, as the playwright, had not even thought of … [it was] an illuminating experience.’
McKellen was ‘terrifically in love with Brodie, then,’ commented Richard Digby Day, interviewed by Barratt, who was part of his Nottingham company, ‘always looking forward to him coming for the weekend. At the weekend they would disappear into a sort of home milieu.’ It seemed Ian was instinctively fashioning himself into a unique character, both offstage and on, even in his mid-twenties.
Sombre violence and hysterical haughtiness followed in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s The Mayor of Zalamea, then ‘racy and rough’ Arthur Seaton in Adam Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, perhaps underlining Ian’s difference from the famous Albert Finney performance in its distillation and thought but missing none of the comedy. All these and more saw him through the winter of 1963 until his final appearance at the Playhouse in May 1964, when he was called upon to impersonate Sir Thomas More, now a sprightly greybeard, in an inferior script attributed to Shakespeare and his contemporaries Dekker and Heywood. Benedict Nightingale, then theatre critic of the Guardian, praised Ian’s More, with his ‘cleverly awkward movement [which] suggests a kind of self-mocking saintliness. [ … ] a performance of dignity without a trace of mawkishness.’
‘The play was a ghastly mishmash of nothing,’ commented a very miserable member of the same Nottingham company who had found them a most unfriendly lot. At the first reading Steven Berkoff had been amazed that this very young man with ‘busy hair, wearing blue jeans and a jeans top’ was cast as More. ‘He looks far too young.’ But when Ian started to read, ‘he had an authority which belied his years.’
One day Berkoff, who had studied mime at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, was showing off some of Lecoq’s technique. Ian, waiting and standing in his cloak, suddenly exclaimed, ‘“Where did you get that?” as if you buy it in the supermarket.’ Berkoff, who thought Nottingham was an awful dump and felt that he was ‘tripping around like a damp squib … with a few lines’, was desperate for the slightest degree of attention. He struck up a friendship with Ian, lasting into the 1990s when they ended up as London neighbours in Limehouse.
Quarrels had broken out in this divided, contentious company between the two directors, John Neville and Frank Dunlop. Ian steered a diplomatic path and did not take sides, leading from the front in the very image of Thomas More. The cry the Volscian soldier, Aufidius, made at the climax of Coriolanus typified the impact McKellen made at Nottingham, showing, as Tyrone Guthrie declared, ‘You cannot hide the actor in the part’ – or certainly not when McKellen was playing it.
He had risen to the height Guthrie demanded of him and shown his protean power. McKellen was ready to move on and the next call came from London.