Curtain call

I once appeared on stage with Sir Ian McKellen. It was not one of my greater moments in the spotlight. It came about late in 1994 (I forget the exact date), when I was in the middle of programming a long season of Shakespeare-related films at the National Film Theatre. One of them was a 1988 TV production of Othello, directed by the actress Janet Suzman from her Market Theatre of Johannesburg production. She turned up at the NFT to see it. I ended up chatting to her, and she ending up inviting me to take part in a debate on stage vs filmed Shakespeare at the Barbican theatre. She would be the host; on the film side would be myself and Anthony Davies (author of Filming Shakespeare’s Plays); on the side of staged Shakespeare would be John Barton and Ian McKellen.

It was a strange day. Ahead of the debate we all had lunch together, but while the theatre greats had a great deal to say to one another, they were indifferent to, if not quite contemptuous of, these peculiar film-loving upstarts to whom they had not been introduced. On the Barbican stage, it got worse. It was not possible to argue with John Barton. It was like taking issue with God. The great director and trainer of verse speaking at the Royal Shakespeare Company had his mind on higher things, rendering debate futile. I was dumb for much of the discussion, only finally finding some words after McKellen, fresh from the triumph of the 1990-92 National Theatre production of Richard III, protested that he wanted to have the production filmed but didn’t want to have any of the words cut. Why did films have to mangle Shakespeare’s words? The audience was 99% behind him. But films don’t work that way, I pleaded, they are about seeing as much as listening. I don’t see why what worked on the stage cannot be the film that I want to see, was the reply. No one will give you the money for that, I said, or thought that I should say (my memory of the event is fading). Pah, said the actor. Pah, said the audience. I beat a meek retreat.

Of course, the irony was that less than a year later McKellen did see a film based on his stage version of Richard III made, but it was radically – and rightly – quite different to what had been seen in the theatre. Late in 1994 the film must have been in mid-production, so McKellen knew what had been done (not least because he co-scripted it with director Richard Loncraine), and was simply expressing some frustration at the changes made. But the changes were correct. Richard III (1995) was cinematic. It showed as much as it spoke. It worked to its own rules.

Told you so.

We move on thirty years, after McKellen had gone to Hollywood in search of a career change, found new fame in superhero movies and epitomised everyone’s dream of a Tolkien character. Now he was back on the stage again, playing Falstaff for the first time, at London’s Noel Coward Theatre, in a concatenation of the two Henry IV plays, entitled Player Kings. And, having not ever seen the man perform on stage (as opposed to sitting dumbly next to him), I had to go. £70-odd is a lot of money for a theatre ticket, but who can put a price on a memory? Now at last I will have seen the man acting.

It was a fine production, whose major failing was more the fault of Shakespeare than Robert Icke the director and adapter of the text. Henry IV part one, the greater part of which forms the first half of Player Kings, is one of Shakespeare’s most accomplished displays of stagecraft. Its qualities were made all the clearer by a fine cast, of whom I much admired Robert Coyle as Henry IV, so wan with care, Toheeb Jimoh as a brooding, troubled Hal, and Geoffrey Freshwater showing the wisdom of many years on the stage in making the most of red-nosed Bardolph. You don’t need that many words if you have the presence required. The only directorial trick that annoyed was making Hal defeat Hotspur by deceit – he stabbed him in the back – which jarred and failed to convince. There were some fine coups de théâtre, notably the opening tavern booming out as though a rave party (a witty shock after the sombre opening scene with King Henry). The brickwork set impressed. We were bothered by a long step at the front of the stage which served no practical purpose and seemed quite a hazard. Some actor could stumble there, we thought.

The second half featured a truncated Henry IV part two, with a brief bit of Henry V to cover the death of Falstaff. As I have said before, Henry IV part two is a shoddy sequel, written to order and lacking in reason. Icke cut an hour from the play, but a turkey is still a turkey no matter how many of its feathers are plucked. The essential rhythm of drama was lost. Even usual gems such as Falstaff’s meeting with Shallow felt awkward, while Falstaff’s cruel rejection by Hal at the latter’s coronation lost some of its force because Falstaff had his back to us.

McKellen, though, was outstanding throughout, as of course he had to be. His was a coughing, spluttering but somehow robust knight, a man whose belief in living was not quite undone by the infirmities of old age. His bulging stomach echoed this, representing both the good life and the bad life he had lived. He was a match, too, for Hal’s jibes and brutalities, or rather McKellen gave us a Falstaff who was a more rounded, contradictory figure than some productions have shown. This was Falstaff as flawed Everyman rather than simply the representation of an England in the process of being lost. Powerful as his stage presence was, however, it was also a modest Falstaff, one that never stole the production from the rest. Falstaff was in his element, and McKellen too.

It was a performance that I hope to remember, though one month on much has faded already. Reviews and photographs help trigger something, but it is the feeling that survives the strongest, rather than the specifics of the actuality. The finest Falstaff I ever saw was John Woodvine, in the English Shakespeare Company’s 1987 production of the two Henry IVs and Henry V, at the Old Vic – all three plays in one stupendous day. What do I remember of that performance? Not much more than an eyebrow raised at a key moment, which brought the house down – only that, and the feeling that here was all that Shakespeare had dreamt of, and more.

What does survive of actors? Of course it used to be memories only, and the words of contemporary commentators, but now we have film and video recordings. Yet what do they preserve? The theatrical greats of over a century ago, when film was young – Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, Eleonora Duse, Johnston Forbes-Robertson – survive on film only as histrionic mysteries. Whoever these shadowy figures were, they cannot be the ones who so enraptured the theatre audiences of their time. Film, rather than being eternal, fades in its significance as time passes, just as its subjects do. Of course, better quality technology, including sound and colour, have given us superficially more convincing archival records of stage performers, but what is missing is what the audience recognised. Successful actors mirror the hearts of their times; great actors change what those hearts expect, but they must still belong to them.

Perhaps this is what lay behind McKellen’s complains at the Barbican, all those years ago. Film would not only change his performance (and the production that encompassed it), it would it some way kill it. The life in it would be gone. It so happens that the Theatre Museum had just begun a video archive of London stage performances, recorded by a limited camera set-up during a live performance, for the purposes of archiving and study. McKellen’s National Theatre Richard III was, I believe, the first production to be recorded for what was called the National Video Archive of Stage Performance, now managed by the Victoria & Albert Museum. The recording was made on 26 May 1992, shot with three video cameras, one fixed giving a full view of the stage in long shot, the other two controlled from positions left and right of the stage to follow the cameras.

There was the ‘film’ that maybe he wanted – every word, every moment, every piece of direction of it, and with the audience too. I have not seen it, but I cannot think that its interest is anything more than academic. It is marvellous, of course, that such a record exists, along with many other video records of stage productions made for the Archive since that time. Watching it would undoubtedly produce a tremor in the heart, different to that which the feature film version of the production may give. If only such an archive had existed decades, or even centuries before – how lucky we would be to see or hear anything of those past performances. But McKellen and his fellow performers of 26 May 1992 will be ghosts. Every actor must die each night that the production ends and the curtain call follows. The life that was there for those two or more hours’ traffic of the stage goes with the bows. Film, which we fondly imagine may preserve, only mocks life. It leaves nothing but walking shadows.

Note: This blog post was half-written when McKellen had a fall from the stage at the Noel Coward Theatre, during the Hal-Hotspur fight, on 17 June 2024. There were hopes that he could return to the production, but it has now been confirmed that he will not be returning to the stage for the play’s UK tour.

Links:

• The UK tour of Player Kings continues, without McKellen, to 27 July 2024. Details of the production, with photographs, are on the production’s website at https://playerkingstheplay.co.uk
• The catalogue entry for the National Video Archive of Stage Performance’s holding of Richard III is here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/archives/unit/ARC69911
• A long time ago I edited (with Olwen Terris) a catalogue of Shakespeare film and video performance, entitled Walking Shadows: Shakespeare in the National Film and Television Archive (London: BFI, 1994). It was a good title.