‘Enter Ego from the wings, pursued by fiends. Exit Ego.’
Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise
Ian’s early and brief big-company days were over; he’d had enough of that for the moment. He was now chancing his luck as a freelance actor in London. He and Brodie found a love nest in Earl’s Terrace, a large ground-floor flat in Number 25, a quiet, secluded, tree-lined turning set back from the western end of Kensington High Street. The house was owned by the playwright Peter Shaffer. It was quite an enclave of theatre people, among them Peter Wyngarde. According to legend, Gerald du Maurier had been conceived at Number 25, which had belonged to his parents. It was a story that McKellen relished recounting.
Answer-phones had just been introduced, and much fun was had among this actor confraternity leaving each other messages with grand voices, pretending to be Olivier, Gielgud or Rex Harrison. Ian and Brodie’s relationship of domestic intimacy was now quite open within their circle, if not in the wider world, while Brodie had stopped teaching – a profession, Ian observed, in which it would be impossible for you to declare you were gay. ‘If I became a teacher, it would have to be hidden,’ he pointed out, again in that 1998 interview. Brodie was to remain very loyal to Ian, with good memories of their shared closeness.
In 1966, Ian and Brodie entertained Wigan friends, Geoffrey Banks and his wife Liz, before going to the Fortune Theatre to see him performing in The Promise. Ian, Banks told Mark Barratt, showed how nervous he was by worrying about if there were ‘enough forks … Brodie just stood with his back to the fire and held forth. But once we were on our way to the theatre, Ian was back to his old self, chattering away.’ It may be that McKellen was just being his awkwardly uncomfortable self, unable in private life to make decisions but always clicking in with the certainty of having a definite part to play. Performing expanded him into an utter carefreeness, but in social situations people would find him restless, unfocused, jerky, awkward.
Prior to this, Ian had opened in Donald Howarth’s A Lily in Little India, seeing for the first time his name in lights over the theatre entrance in St Martin’s Lane – third billing after Jill Bennett and Jesse Watson. The production had already run a few weeks at the Hampstead Theatre Club before its transfer, but, as McKellen said on the afternoon of the first night in late January 1966, they ‘haven’t got the photographs up yet’.
McKellen played the luckless juvenile lead as he had in A Scent of Flowers, this time escaping from a draconian mother: it is comic at first as his solution is to raise a prize Dragon’s Fang Lily, a plant he is ready to defend with his life. When his mother makes her felonious assault on it through the bedroom window he hurls her to the ground and decamps with the cherished object to the home of a sympathetic girl.
Before the West End opening, Ian showed extraordinary nerve by inviting Lawrence Doble, a writer from the Observer, to spend the whole day with him. The ensuing article gives an insight into ‘a day in the life of ‘ his existence at that time:
This day’s end is the evening on which the whole of his future life and career depends. To begin, here he is at 10.30, singing very loudly in his bath, letting into 25 Earl’s Terrace someone he has never met before, chatting away merrily when he emerges in sweater and jeans, serves coffee as the visitor eyes his books: Michael Foot’s life of Aneurin Bevan very left-wing, politically correct even in 1965: a good choice for the Observer where Kenneth Tynan rules the critical roost. It is joined by Keats’ letters, a biography of Ivor Novello. A touch of childhood is thrown in over coffee, the usual quiet teasing, testing of his visitor’s sexuality as he asserts gently that it is not camp to be interested in music hall, it is being part of a tradition. ‘I used to go backstage at the Bolton Grand while I was still at school … When we did a play at school I ran home for tea to get back quickly, or maybe I wouldn’t go home at all. Doing a play was exciting. It was like having a secret.
Elspeth Cochrane may or may not join them for lunch, then it’s the bank, petty purchases in Kensington High Street, and after a piccata, he confesses, going into the tube, that he has not slept much this week. His usual method of combating insomnia is to think of parts of his body, starting with his toes, but this hasn’t worked. After a host of worries on arrival at the theatre, for instance whether his shoes need spraying to make them darker and inspecting sight lines in the gallery (‘I couldn’t see their eyes at the dress circle’) they call on Jill Bennett in her dressing room. The privileged watcher is still in attendance, included in this intimacy and privacy, which at the same time is fake.
He and Bennett sit opposite in chairs only a foot apart and run through lines. ‘I don’t know why people make such a fuss about first nights,’ [Bennett] says, digging her nails into the arm of the chair. ‘My housekeeper’s burning candles to St Anthony.’ ‘I wasn’t a bit nervous until I got to the theatre,’ says McKellen. Someone starts to do various exercises on another floor. ‘I wish they wouldn’t,’ Bennett says, ‘it makes me feel I ought to be doing them.’ ‘Olivier does weight-lifting,’ says McKellen [again the Olivier obsession!], then adding, ‘Maggie Smith plays records of the Beatles … She says they’re soothing.’
They send up the lily which appears in the play:
McKELLEN: It’s the star now.
BENNETT: It’s very strong and big.
McKELLEN: A real Dragon’s Fang.
Astonishingly, this carefreeness about the first night carries on until the first call: ‘Fifteen minutes, ladies and gentlemen, to curtain up’ with messages, good luck and a whole Roi de Soleil levee court unfolding around this actor, only twenty-seven years old, completely at ease, utterly unfazed while the impresario and playwright drop in with champagne and flowers.
McKellen won rapturous accolades in this role: ‘a perfect mirror’ for adolescent torments. Plays and Players described how his face, ‘whether darkly framed by a Balaclava helmet or active with pride at the sight of the fast-growing lily, becomes a peaceful mirror for the amusements and ecstasies within’. He was now already established as a star on that rarefied plane of status and observance with its own rules remote from everyday life.
McKellen, still the humble Bolton boy at heart, with his Vespa parked outside the theatre, had begun to be surrounded by his court, as yet a small one, and it was to continue thus. He had this capacity at a precocious age to open himself up to almost complete scrutiny, making a nearly open book of his life, while at the same time keeping something deeply hidden. The media, which never stopped making him the subject of interviews, photo-shoots, speculation, conspired with him to keep the secret of his sexuality. Why? To hint or suggest he was gay might still lead to a libel case – unless of course he was prepared to come out and admit it himself. What was to stop him? Fear of public opinion, the general prejudice against gay people? From 1967 sex in private between two men who had both reached the age of twenty-one was no longer illegal. Yet concern that it could adversely affect his career was still very strong and probably justified. Maybe, he thought, he wouldn’t have been playing David Copperfield in the TV serial he recorded during the St Martin’s run of A Lily in Little India.
Among other productions, there was also the successful long run of Alexis Arbuzov’s The Promise at the Fortune Theatre. In this he played one of two secondary leads, the other being Ian McShane, to Judi Dench. Ian with his usual critical perspicacity had spotted Judi Dench long before: pure acting personality and a rich, warm being on which he could draw to learn and develop his craft. She was five years older than him, too, so there was no doubt who was the senior, both in status and stardom. Yes, she was a woman, so there was no danger here for him in terms of sexual attraction, although maybe in competitiveness.
‘Where have you been? We’re all waiting to start!’ The thirty-two-year-old leading lady, quite peremptory, short (only 5ft ½in) had barked at her leading man at the first Playhouse rehearsal. He was twenty minutes late, and suitably and charmingly abashed at keeping her waiting. He was highly excited at seeing the Juliet he had admired at the Old Vic in the flesh with John Stride in the 1957 production, and even more at the prospect of learning from her example. She was much more than ‘a bit’ of a role model for him because he had seen her as Juliet. ‘The idea that if you were going to act seriously you would not be too careful about where you did it, but you’d be careful about the company you did it in, seemed to me was what Judi was doing, and that was what I decided to do myself, so she was a bit of a special person.’
This sense of seniority held during rehearsals and performance. She was streaks ahead of him. His image of her rehearsing was of her tapping her toe, finishing off the Telegraph crossword, just waiting for everyone to catch up. ‘Come on, what’s the problem?’ Ian said of her. ‘She has a facility for acting which is bewildering, with a blazing sincerity and honesty; it wasn’t a series of tricks she pulled out of the bag, it was all freshly minted in front of your eyes.’ Like that mesmerising effect Peggy Ashcroft had on him as an adolescent, here was the woman anima incarnate. There must have been an echo also of that unfinished business with Margery Lois McKellen, which he always carried forward inside him as part of his unsolved mystery. Yet, on the first night, as Judi confessed to Ian, even she was very nervous and told him, ‘I’m just going to concentrate on the front row – focus on the three seats in the centre of the row and think that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are sitting there.’ Ian countered, ‘They’d be sitting in one seat, surely?’
The Promise was a surprising hit and Judi Dench stayed with it well into the Fortune Theatre transfer, until the three-and-a-half hours of fur hats and coats began to pall.
After an unfortunate ten-day run for The Promise at Henry Miller’s Theatre in New York, where it was picketed by American actors protesting against English actors appearing in the US, Ian returned to the Old Vic in a revival of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy. Jacobi had rocketed to stardom in the original National Theatre production as Brindsley Miller, the lead. Ian did not play this but took over Albert Finney’s limp-wristed dealer Gorringe – the ‘antique-fancying pouf ‘ in the phrase of the Mail‘s Peter Lewis.
McKellen’s first TV job had been in The Tomb of his Ancestor, the BBC Rudyard Kipling series in 1964, with two lines to say sitting up a tree in the rain on Hampstead Common. He told his agent, ‘If that’s your TV you can keep it!’ He failed screen tests for Barbarella!. He failed to land the Australian outback outlaw Ned Kelly, when not only did he ‘work out’ for three months prior to the test, but also played a scene several times over in Bushey Park with others. Tony Richardson cast Mick Jagger.
A film he made with Gregory Peck with the unlikely title of The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling went the way of its title and closed down owing to early snow in Switzerland. McKellen received a welcome £4,000, although he was to feel sometimes he never earned enough, spent little or nothing on clothes, and took frugal holidays. Two films in 1969, A Touch of Love and an adaptation of The Promise, did little to expand his hopes.
In Alfred the Great, his first big-budget film, McKellen played Roger the Bandit opposite two stars hardly older than him, Michael York, acting the Norse King Guthrum, and David Hemmings as King Arthur. York and Hemmings, not only enemies in the film, rented rival castles, York Gergana Castle near Galway, Hemings the much grander Oranmore Castle. Hemmings kept a court, threw lavish parties, inviting over and feasting his friends, among them iconic models Penelope Tree and Cheryl Tiegs, and photographer David Bailey. Ian coveted their film stardom and profitably observed their behaviour for his next stage roles.
The play of Richard II deals with the events of 1398–1399, when Richard, at the end of his twenty-two-year-reign, aroused huge discontent by instituting forced loans, and by his cronyism and arbitrary rule. It is a chronicle of catastrophe which the king brings on himself. When Jacobi played the role in 1988 for Prospect, the same company as Ian in 1968, he was nearer the well-seasoned, mature king showing the wear-and-tear of history. The self-defeating arrogance and narcissism was to the fore, as traits unusual in a man of his age, the self-realisation of what he had done to himself as a mature ruler, movingly poignant.
Prospect was essentially a touring company, based at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, since 1961 under the sway of the formidable and substantially built Elizabeth Sweeting; its manager. Toby Robertson, the same age as John Barton and a contemporary of his at Cambridge, became Prospect’s artistic director, with Richard Cottrell as his second-in-command. Cottrell, who also had a close history at Cambridge with Ian, asked him if he would do a modest nine-week tour playing the impetuous, self-regarding, kingly narcissist with ‘the face that like the sun did make beholders wink’.
McKellen, whose method was to seek contemporary figures to tie his view of a Shakespearean part to today’s world (implementing the theory developed by Jan Kott, at the time the all-pervasive, fashionable Shakespeare guru), claims that he drew first for this part on the Dalai Lama, someone to present to modern audiences a clear idea of divinity and belief in the Divine Right of Kings. But the modest, self-effacing Dalai Lama had little in common with Richard except that he is worshipped as a god in his religion. The saintliness of this modest self-effacing figure, who is known worldwide and worshipped not primarily as a god (which he is to his own people), but as a prophet of peace and love, is never an aspect of Shakespeare’s character. It is a paradox that while Ian (and Cottrell) made Richard ‘Our Contemporary’, they underlined and played for everything it was worth the medieval notion upon which Shakespeare shows Richard fixated – the Divine Right of Kings.
When it came to performance the Dalai Lama, who made a good headline, was dropped for the ‘true contemporary’, the pop idol. The appeal of McKellen as Richard became that of the self-destructive pop star whose hubris was that he was above everyone else, and that he was ‘God’, in other words a manmade ego-god. So Cottrell and McKellen found the modern as well as eternal appeal in the Plantagenet court, and with a slant of ageism made Shakespeare’s ‘goodies’ its baddies. John of Gaunt, who when Alec Guinness played the king and Ralph Richardson Gaunt, was the true exponent of what Shakespeare was demonstrating about the corruption of power, became, as Paul Hardman played him, the evil antagonist.
The highly commendable result, then, was that McKellen, decked out in exotic finery, exaggerated toylike splendour, and with a seductive, youthful, pouting appearance, wowed young audiences with the production’s defiance of age and the traditional established order. The contemporary parallels of David Bowie and Mick Jagger were now only too evident. This approach was applied throughout the play until Richard’s sheer incompetence as a ruler showed up the falseness of his fame and attention, which fell away until he was left trapped and pacing the perimeter of his cell, harking back to lost glory: ‘Oh world, thy slippery turn! Friends now fast sworn,/Whose double bosoms seem to wear one heart…’
While Alec Guinness had foundered in this role by confusing the insecurity of his own personal identity with Richard, McKellen triumphantly, in Guthrie’s words, ‘rose above’, bringing great clarity to Richard’s self-pity as his protective shell of majesty cracks and crumbles into pieces. He was exceptionally good in this latter part of the play. Sometimes the pathos of particular lines was over-egged, as Irving Wardle complained in The Times, but most memorable and revealing in its heartfelt power to move, was Ian’s cry as Richard – ‘Taste grief, need friends.’
Toby Robertson, Prospect’s artistic director, did not wholly approve of Ian’s reading of this line, and while admitting this story was against himself, said he felt Ian exaggerated the part. In the ‘need friends’ scene, he thought that ‘he wailed those last words and I found it embarrassing. I told Cottrell that I thought they should be toned down. But neither he nor Ian agreed and so he went on saying them like that. Of course, that was the one speech that the critics commended!’ Michael Billington was one: ‘I have never heard the line … come across with such poignant urgency.’
Richard Cottrell reflected later, in 1981, that he and Ian saw Richard clearly in terms of his spiritual journey, ‘shallow and heartless at the beginning, then the pivot coming at the “needs friends” speech – that suddenly came out as a great cry at a rehearsal … That was the turning-point.’ Tydeman says he could in 2017 still hear the heart-rending tone in Ian’s voice as he cried out ‘I need friends,’ then repeated it with the emphasis on need: ‘I NEED friends!’
After they opened, McKellen, with his wide eclectic range of other influences – rather like rival playwright Robert Greene’s attack on Shakespeare as the ‘upstart crow dependent on our feathers’ – was accused of stealing bits of his interpretation from, inter alias, Gielgud, John Neville, Paul Scofield and Alec Guinness. Audrey Williamson, journalist and author of Old Vic Drama, pointed out that his ceremonial entrance came from Gielgud, his rhythmic pacing in prison from Guinness.
While he had most likely seen the productions, McKellen, touchy and intellectual in self-defence as he could sometimes become, refuted these claims some fourteen years later (‘My commitment is to the audience and not the critics’). There was no need for this. There was no doubt, in these first weeks of touring the role, that he had pulled off a towering coup de théâtre. Also paradoxically, the Dalai Lama idea they began with had an effect for Cottrell and McKellen, as Harold Hobson, a committed believer in God, attested; which perhaps shows that it does not much matter how you get there, as long as you do. ‘From the moment of his entry,’ he wrote, ‘we see that this Richard regards himself not, as we have always thought, as divinely God-protected, but as actually divine himself.’ According to Hobson, Mr McKellen had on stage ‘more than human smoothness … his arms are upraised from the elbows, framing the godhead and the crown, and fixed like the many arms of an Eastern Deity. His Richard is a god, but neither Christian nor Hebrew. He knows no compassion for his creatures nor at first revenge. His serenity is celestial and appalling … And yet, this god, this Deity, when he is with his boon companions, his Bushey, Bagot, Greene is not a god at all but only an educated potboy…’
Young audiences, not surprisingly, were drawn like moths to this blinding illumination of youth and the underlining of student-age preoccupations, especially vulnerability, self-distrust and the painful journey towards self-knowledge. Maybe, too, the cry for friends was prophetic, a turning-point for youth, ready for expansion. Richard II opened the following year’s Edinburgh Festival followed by a long continental tour.
When Prospect was asked to furnish a second play along with Richard II for the Assembly Hall in the 1969 Edinburgh Festival, Toby Robertson thought, first, of the film star Gary Bond as Henry V, then of Jacobi as Edward II, with Ian as his first choice for the part of Gaveston. When Jacobi, who was filming I, Claudius, could not appear, Robertson asked Bond again, who agreed. But Bond then dropped out, so there seemed no one else and the part of Edward II fell into Ian’s lap. The task of playing both Richard II and Edward II in the same repertoire was monumental. Robertson, a charismatic convincer, took Ian to lunch and persuaded him.
So who was Toby Robertson? Six foot four tall, gangling limbed, warm-hearted, with a twinkling, mischievous look in his eye, and always protective and paternal towards his cast, he perhaps never had the attention and acclaim he deserved. Perhaps by being self-effacing he lacked the dictatorial streak that rocketed other directors into celebrity. He did not, as Peter Hall described it, see directing as an ego-fuelled, entrepreneurial profession, but rather more as a midwifery calling. When Robertson had directed Jacobi as Edward II for the Marlowe Society at Cambridge earlier, Jacobi said Toby helped him to feel ‘as if Marlowe had written this part specifically just for me, with its amazing combination of vulnerability, doubt, passion, confusion and power – and, I have to add, specifically many and varied rhythms and musical notes’.
When Ian opened in Edward II in the dour Assembly Hall, with the innovatory staging in the round established by Tyrone Guthrie, the audience rose to its feet in tumultuous acclaim. Timothy West, who previously had played Bolingbroke, and now was the antagonist Mortimer, could not believe that, acted as it was ‘in a gothic vault’, a play that began with two men kissing on the mouth, could receive such a rapturous reception.
But there were dissenting voices, weighty with disapproval, for this must-see production. ‘It is shocking and it is filthy,’ John Kidd, a City Father, fulminated at the on-stage kissing between Edward and Gaveston in that hallowed ground where the elders of the Kirk of Scotland meet. The police were called. Ian Mackintosh, the company general manager, managed to persuade them not to call off the production by saying he himself did not object, and his father and grandfather were moderators of the Church of Scotland.
The shock, as ever, generated welcome publicity, but it was the difference between the two kings he alternated playing that McKellen was most determined to emphasise, at the cost, perhaps, of some of the quality of the work. Both directors, Cottrell and Robertson, had the same approach to Ian, namely they had no overall mission to fulfil, and did not want in any way to impose their reading on the text. This was in the hallowed tradition, still, of Dadie Rylands’ approach of letting the plays speak for themselves as their enabler and allowing their timeless appeal to come over. Edward was much more of an operatic and musical play with Marlowe’s mighty lines.
Ian’s portrayal underlined the coarser side of Edward’s sensuality, which was not to everyone’s taste. Robertson’s ultimate trust in leaving it to McKellen to impose his own stamp on Edward did not at all please Harold Hobson, although he praised the ‘bold and hypocritical production’, proclaiming Marlowe ‘as pro-sodomy and anti-snob’. While conceding Ian was an actor of great spiritual grace, ‘he is not graceful to look at’, and all these smacking kisses before his angry nobles suggested to Hobson little more than that Edward was tiresomely addicted to showing off. Finally, he believed the great ovation raised by McKellen ‘was not really deserved’ as his performance descended into ‘monotonously exhibitionist reiteration … This is worse than disappointing: it is positively boring…’
Yet taking on this double yoke became ‘the making of Ian’. Irving Wardle in The Times did not find the play to be boring at all, pointing out that Ian’s Edward did not follow a linear development but a ‘series of bold leaps involving startling physical transformations – the infantile lover, with no interest whatever in Kingship … hardly able to lift a sword, changing into the blood-drunken warlord and finally the emaciated wreck in the sewers of Berkeley.’ It was an extraordinary quirk of fate that by Jacobi’s default, it was these two roles that established Ian’s pre-eminence as the classic stage actor.
When Robertson had directed Derek Jacobi in Edward II at Cambridge, the production, in which I played a small part, owed much to the beautiful scoring, modulation and above all the pace of verse-speaking Jacobi and Richard Marquand as Gaveston brought into play. Behind Toby’s production, together with Rylands’ influence on the verse-speaking, had been the éminence grise of Barton’s dictatorial hand. Reflecting on the contrast between the two productions nearly twenty years afterwards, Robertson told Joy Leslie Gibson: ‘The production … with Jacobi was quite different. It was a political play, I felt Ian brandished, flaunted the homosexuality … I had had a fruitful and happy time with Derek exploring the play … Ian was too actorish, too much “we’re in the theatre.”‘ Robertson missed the interaction of power and suffering that Jacobi brought to the part, claiming McKellen was too narcissistic and lost people’s sympathy. ‘My lasting memory is of his brandishing a sword over his head as the lights went down at the end of the first act. A typical, theatrical, McKellen gesture.’
This was not the first and last time Ian succumbed to what Hobson called ‘the destructive tide of homosexual infatuation’, although he was to become more subtle and discerning in his expression of it. The difference was that in Richard II, McKellen captured or showed the inner qualities of genius, the quicksilver brain (his own, that is), the need for secrecy that Richard possessed in common with Shakespeare. In Edward II, Marlowe, a writer of much broader pen strokes, did not possess this.
And curiously enough, too, the two sides of McKellen’s amatory personality appeared to be emerging to the fore with these regal overreachers. With Richard there was the intense need and desire for worship and friendship, and with Edward the powerful urge towards expression of sexuality. Away from the theatre, on the one hand, there was still Brodie, ever faithful and dependable; on the other there was now to be someone else of a very different calibre.