There are good reasons for Sir Ian to feel upbeat. Opening a week after 9/11, The Dance of Death did very well on Broadway, calling on the new camaraderie as well as the normal commitment of New York audiences and winning the actor super reviews. It will be surprising if Sean Mathias’s recast revival - Frances de la Tour replacing Helen Mirren as Alice, Edgar’s rancorous wife - doesn’t impress Londoners too.
Again, McKellen says that he’s become a happier man and, he thinks, a more confident, assured and truthful actor since he emerged from the closet 14 years ago. But another factor is fame, something he once apologetically admitted he would, well, sort of quite like. And now, thanks to the magician Gandalf in Lord of the Rings and the killer-mutant Magneto in the cultish X-Men, he’s genuinely if not inordinately famous. Even without those preposterous whiskers and that heavy shamanic couture he finds children stopping in the street to stare at him. “Yes, it’s me”, he says - and offers an autograph. He says he knows that fame doesn’t lead to anything deep, close or nurturing. He knows that it can send people mad. But, yes, it’s agreeable for a one-time Burnley boy to sit next to Meryl Streep at the Oscars, or have Colin Powell introduce himself as “your mailman” at the same ceremony and drop a missive from his niece into his lap, or go to a Vancouver cinema for a midnight showing of The Two Towers and be introduced to a packed-out audience initially irked by the break in the proceedings:
”The loudest, deepest voice I’ve ever heard said “Gandalf!” and I scampered to the front and 1,100 people leapt out of their seats and cheered and waved and shrieked. It didn’t prove anything except that they love Gandalf and Lord of the Rings, but to be at the receiving end! The affection!”
McKellen’s Gandalf has vox, too. As he says, he’s never been frightened of the big stuff. Playing roles like Edward II and Richard II in cavernous theatres as a young actor readied him for the task of majestically defying fire demons in Lord of the Rings. It was, he says, “familiar .territory: like shouting on the battlefield when you’re Coriolanus.”
Yet his career to date has been one of shrinkage, diminuendo: in his words, “going down, down down”. One key step in that readjustment was playing Macbeth and Iago for Trevor Nunn - two genuinely great performances - in a theatre so intimate that the audience was only feet away. Another was the experience of preparing for a film career, and especially for the task of transposing his fascist-era Richard III from stage to screen, by taking cameo parts in other movies. That way, he says, he learnt that the camera wasn’t an enemy. That way, he overcame what he at first found the acute embarrassment of doing close-ups or reverses when the only human faces in range belonged to technicians behind a machine focused on himself: “The last thing you want to think about is them, so you have to forget yourself, forget that people are watching, forget that this moment is being captured for all time. You have to go inside the character and believe you’re him. And if that belief is total the camera will see the character and not the actor.”
That’s as difficult as it is intense, but McKellen doesn’t think it’s essentially different from the task confronting him in a live theatre. Or at least the difference is no greater than between acting in the Donmar or the Cottesloe and acting in the ample acreage of Drury Lane: “I think now that the camera is a very small theatre, with the audience very, very close - and very friendly too.”
Publicly acknowledging his homosexuality has also helped. As an actor, McKellen had always believed it a point of honour to (as he puts it) “cut myself and the character open as much as seems to be necessary and allow the audience to see the emotions inside.” But even in his quieter performances he had felt there was a veil between himself and the spectators. And his more orotund acting was, he thinks, actually a form of self-concealment. After all, there’s no better camouflage than showing off, no deeper disguise than shouting very daringly on a large stage. But now the veil has lifted. He doesn’t have to be secretive or tell lies offstage any longer, and so he can be honest, open and free onstage. He doesn’t have to censor aspects of himself, the character, or both, that might be too revealing. He can, he says, physically sense the change in a diaphragm that had always before felt blocked. Soon after coming out he played Chekhov’s Vanya with notable success at the Cottesloe, and, for the first time in his career, found himelf weeping onstage.
Even the Academy seems to have recognised this gain in immediacy and emotional truth. Sir Ian won an Oscar nomination for his performance as the gay film director James Whale in Gods and Monsters in 1998, as well as for Gandalf in 2002: “If I can be Gandalf or James Whale in front of the camera,” he says, “it’s because I can be Ian McKellen away from the camera.”
He also seems determined to go on splitting his career between stage and screen. The third part of Lord of the Rings is all but shot and an as-yet-unidentified British independent film is in the offing. He’d like, some time, to play Lear with Nunn as director and, for fun, a dame in a panto. Most especially, he yearns to belong to a genuine ensemble. After all, he has toured with Prospect Theatre, helped to found the Actors Company, worked with the RSC when it was at its strongest, led a mini-company at Peter Hall’s National, and back in 1998 went to Leeds for a three-play season of traditional rep: Dorn in Chekhov’s Seagull, the glamorous Gary Essendine in Coward’s Present Laughter and (a performance he thinks underprepared) Prospero in The Tempest.
He readily admits that he’d prefer now to be returning to the British stage with a new play in a company that allowed performers to remain together long enough to get to know each other fully, rehearse properly and generally deepen their work. But that’s not yet on offer from the National, RSC or anywhere else, and so, when the chance came to revive The Dance of Death in the West End, he took it.
“I don’t think I fully cracked the part in New York,” he says. “In fact, I’m rather ashamed of the performance I was giving. I think it was far too big.” That may have been partly because of a wide set open to the Swedish coast. Sir Ian thinks its counterpart at the Lyric, which is more enclosed, should encourage more intimate playing and produce the claustrophobic feel Strindberg wanted. The play is, after all, about an intense, troubled marriage: “Everyone who sees it tells you they know a couple like that. They just cannot get away from each other. It’s savage, yes, but also funny. There’s a lot of quick-fire repartee, like Private Lives.”
And the appeal of Edgar himself isn’t just that he’s one of Strindberg’s richer creations. He’s a soldier, and McKellen, who comes from a pacifist family, has always taken a subversive glee in showing the frailties of military men: “Macbeth, Richard III, Iago, Coriolanus. I’ve sometimes thought that’s my revenge on people who kill for a living. Shakespeare’s soldiers can be trusted, can’t they, as long as they’re soldiering, but they make dreadful politicians and they are hopeless in their personal lives.”
Also, Edgar spends a lot of time sitting down: “With Shakespeare you never get to sit unless you’re the king, and the play lasts three-and-a-half hours, while Dance of Death is down in two-and-a-half. At the end of the evening you feel very, very tired and I think part of the reason is you’ve had to stand up so much.” What? Was he serious about that? Yes, said Sir Ian, but, as so often now, he said it with a grin.
