Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings
Culture
Lord of the luvvies
by Stephen Jewell
This week, the great Ian McKellen is back in New Zealand, acting in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring productions of King Lear and The Seagull. He tells STEPHEN JEWELL why he can’t have sex in Singapore or smoke in New Zealand and why “you can always rely on Shakespeare”.
Just as the titular majesty goes missing in the third act of King Lear, Sir Ian McKellen is proving equally elusive.
The original plan was to travel up to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch the final performance of King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Courtyard Theatre and then meet McKellen and co-star Frances Barber the following day.
Unfortunately, as the allotted hour ticks around, only Barber – who plays Goneril, plus Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, which the RSC is also touring – arrives, apologising profusely for her co-star and housemate’s absence. She hobbles in on a crutch, wearing a moon boot, the legacy of the acute anterior cruciate ligament injury she sustained to her knee after her bicycle collided with a tourist on one of the historical town’s cobblestoned streets.
“It’s a massive irony. I’ve ridden my bike in London for 20 years and I’ve never had an accident and I came to this sleepy little village and this is the worst accident that you could have,” says Barber. “I was misdiagnosed so I kept walking on it. I was rupturing it further until the last preview night. I had got to the moment where what I used to do was get the knife and run off. As I jumped up, it went. So I crawled on one knee backstage to change to come on for the death. Ian was waiting to come on with Cordelia and there was real panic going on.”
Since then, Barber has stayed with McKellen. “Ian’s been wonderful to me,” says Barber. “After it happened on stage, I couldn’t move so he got a wheelchair and wheeled me back to his place because he lives two doors away from the theatre, and I’ve never left. At first, I couldn’t do anything so he’s been carrying me to the loo. I knew him before, but now we’ve become like an old married couple, in a nice way.”
Amazingly, Barber showed no sign of a limp as she strode around the Courtyard’s large stage the previous night. “It’s been like an out-of-body experience. ‘Am I actually doing this? Am I walking?’ I wear a long costume and underneath I’ve got this huge skiing brace which I will probably still be wearing in New Zealand.”
McKellen, who it later turns out has been waylaid by children at an opening at a local school, eventually calls me when I am on the train back to London. We reschedule for his Limehouse address a few days later during an all-too-brief break at home before the two productions travel north to Newcastle.
However, on the morning of our appointment McKellen’s PA calls to delay our rendezvous a few more hours. We finally meet at Joe Allen, a theatre-themed cellar restaurant around the corner from the Theatre Royal, where McKellen will be attending the much-vaunted but critically divisive Lord of the Rings musical in an hour’s time.
“They’ve got their work cut out for them,” says McKellen, who was last in New Zealand for the premiere of Return of the King at the end of 2003. “It seemed that the whole of Wellington turned out onto the streets; it was like a public holiday.
“I wish we weren’t going back in the middle of winter,” he says. “It will be cold and wet and very windy in Wellington. I would like the rest of the company to see something of the countryside but, depending on the weather, they won’t see New Zealand at its glorious best. But anyway, I’m not going there for a holiday, I’m going there to work.”
McKellen is keen to point out that The Seagull is as significant as King Lear. “I hope people in New Zealand don’t think that King Lear is coming – what’s coming is the Royal Shakespeare Company. It doesn’t just do one play; it’s important that you see a group of people doing two plays. If the Moscow Art Theatre comes over, I suppose people would expect them to do Russian plays, but the RSC on the whole does great plays and there are great plays that weren’t written by Shakespeare and The Seagull is one of them. It’s a good chance for people to see actors doing different stuff and Trevor Nunn has directed both productions, of course. I think it’s worked very well.”
McKellen’s fears are probably groundless. Demand for King Lear has been greater, but both it and The Seagull have almost sold out in Auckland and Wellington.
And it is not just McKellen and Barber who are heading to New Zealand – the remainder of the cast includes several well-known veterans and promising young actors such as erstwhile Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy as Lear’s Fool and longstanding television actor William Gaunt (The Champions, Next of Kin), who, apart from taking on Gloucester in Lear also shares with McKellen the supporting role of Sorin in The Seagull.
“I always prefer doing theatre with a company rather than just one-off plays,” says McKellen. “Lord of the Rings felt like a company. We spent so much time together.”
But considering its iconic status, King Lear has inevitably received more attention than The Seagull as McKellen follows in the legendary footsteps of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Orson Welles and Ian Holm.
Page 1 
