Words from Ian McKellen

After the double success of Richard 2 & Edward 2, I said yes immediately when Prospect Theatre invited me to join them on tour again, this time as Hamlet. It had never been an ambition, though I didn't share Peter O'Toole's view (disclosed to me in his Stratford dressing room late 1950s) that playing him was not much more rewarding than an exercise in masturbation. I'm always doubtful when an actor is dubbed, "The Hamlet of his generation," particularly as no one ever wrote it about mine! Mind you, the competition was considerable in UK 1971, when other Princes of Denmark included Alan Bates and Richard Chamberlain. I was 31, the same age as Hamlet by the end of the play.

Who to direct? Toby Robertson (Prospect's main man) suggested himself. I countered with Robert Chetwyn, who at Ipswich had directed me as Henry 5,  Luther and Comic Chinese Policeman in the annual pantomime. Toby without a murmur withdrew. Bob's first appointee was Michael Annals, the National Theatre's star designer, to do our set and costumes. A distinguished cast was assembled.

Bob and I talked before rehearsals and he persuaded me that we shouldn't tell the Olivier story of "a man who couldn't make up his mind." Our Hamlet was a youngster who knows exactly what has to be done, but lacks the manly resources to do it. He grows up until finally he is ready: and the readiness is all. Many of Shakespeare's heroes go on such painful journeys to maturity.

I wore pants tucked into boots and a woollen sweater under a fringed leather jacket. We had a psychedelic, multi-faceted Ghost, reflected in the mirrors of Annals' impressionistic set."Had I ever taken drugs?" Bob and his partner the writer Howard Schumann asked. I hadn't: So a couple of joints were delivered and I did my best to feel a little of the intensity which Hamlet feels when his father comes back from the dead.

Bob had other bright ideas. Like King Claudius, Queen Gertrude should be a drinker and ironically die by drinking her husband's poison. Faith Brook lived in her own sozzled royal world of regret and confusion and you could see why Hamlet might love her and want to protect her.

Claudius was the doughty Ronald Lewis, though when he occasionally took an unexplained night off, his understudy was Tim Piggott-Smith in one of his first professional jobs. Ever-dependable Tim also took over as Laertes during the engagement, which took us 'round the UK and then to the Cambridge Theatre in London.

Our West End opening was attended by Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, renowned theatre historians, whose unique archive of programmes, photographs and other ephemera is now held by Bristol University. They had written 19 theatre books including a pictorial record of Hamlet Through the Ages. When I clambered back to my dressing-room, they were waiting, cheery and voluble as ever. "Congratulations! You are our 73rd Hamlet!" cried Ray. "Yes," added Joe, chuckling, "and we can remember something about every one of them. For instance, John Neville's Hamlet had a little hole in his tights" (pointing to his own crotch) "right there!"

Others, including too many critics, were less enthusiastic. One of the pains of being a drama critic must be the number of Hamlets that have to be regularly endured. So I didn't take personally those smarty-pants condemnations like the one with which Harold Hobson ended his critique in the Sunday Times. "The best thing about Ian McKellen's Hamlet is his curtain call": Not, I believed, the view of our regional audiences who were less familiar with the play than Sir Harold. In Aberdeen, a girl of about 14 was waiting at the stage-door still shaking from the thrill of seeing the play and its multiple deaths for the first time. She had waited to check that I was still alive.

In Wales, I shared digs with old friends Susan Fleetwood and Julian Curry (Ophelia and Horatio). The roast lamb devoured and well into the Pinot noir, my mates broached the tricky subject of Hamlet's pauses, that they claimed were getting longer each night. "ME pausing! It's everybody else who needs to get a move on!" So they played a sound tape that had been recorded that evening to prove their case. It took me less than 10 seconds to admit I was wrong and the next night, I managed to remove many minutes of silence from my performance, to everyone's satisfaction.

There was an eventful tour across major cities in Europe. In Rome, the performance was delayed while the audience took its time to arrive. I'd been warned that they might be late but not that they would talk to each other throughout the play, with the exception of Hamlet's soliloquies, when the keener ones would stand in the aisles to take my photograph. At the first night I was introduced (and fell for) Peter Chatel, a German actor of my age, working in Italy and recently out of an Italian gaol, awaiting a trial for possessing cannabis. Also locked-up was a cardinal, convicted of purloining funds from the Vatican Bank. Peter asked him if he was guilty. "Put it this way" his Excellency confessed: "when I get out of here, I'm going to retire to Switzerland." Peter himself was released without trial through the good services of Willy Brandt, whom he had publically supported in his election for the Presidency of West Germany. I was soon a beneficiary of this world of intrigue and rule-breaking.

The night before I was due to fly with the company to Vienna and a performance the same night at the Theatre an der Wien, Peter and I overslept. He raced his rattly Volkswagen through the early morning rush hour in the unlikely hope I might catch the plane. We made it to the airport, after departure time, with Peter distributing liras and shouting, to anyone who would listen, that I had to get to Vienna, even bribing an official to drive me across the tarmac to where the plane was, thank goodness, still on the runway. Prospect's director, Toby Robertson meanwhile explained his dilemma to the captain, who obligingly declared "Amleto senza il principe? Impossibile!" He turned off the engine until I arrived.

Back home with more than a hundred Hamlets behind me, there were nights at the Cambridge Theatre when I needed a spur to go on. I would peep (as I still often do) at the audience through an obliging hole in the front of house curtain, to remind myself of the obvious, that it was worth doing the show since so many individuals had paid and turned up to see it. One evening, Guildenstern was also spying but with other motives. If he spotted an attractive woman in the front stalls, at the end of the show, already half-dressed in his day clothes under his costume, he would rush through the stage door to await the emergence of his lucky choice. He would hand her a copy of Shakespeare's love sonnets with the seductive whisper "Tonight it was all just for you" and then rush away to cycle home and to wait.  In the book, the beauty would find the actor's name and the number of his telephone. Guildenstern waited for it to ring. "It does about one in ten times — not bad eh?"

Late in the day, nearly 50 years on, I've discovered the New York Times' review, penned by the English exile Clive Barnes, the Butcher of Broadway. One evening after playing The Promise on Broadway, I spent an instructive few hours while Clive explained his critical method. He marked his reviews from "Rave" to its opposite, careful always to supply at least one quotable compliment to keep his name posted outside grateful theatres.  Despite the misspelling of McKellen I cherish his review, clearly not a "Rave" but nor is it quite the opposite. The sweet irony is that, after Hamlet, I left Prospect to co-found The Actors' Company, an experiment in theatre democracy which was all about not trying to be a star. — Ian McKellen, London, August 2020

Comments and Reviews

UK/EUROPEAN TOUR:

Nottingham Playhouse: 23-27 March

Theatre Royal, Newscastle-upon-Tyne: 29 March - 3 April

His Majesty's, Aberdeen: 5-10 April

King's, Edinburgh: 12-17 April

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Grand, Wolverhampton

New, Cardiff

Theatre Royal, Brighton

Rome; Antwerp;Cologne;The Hague;

Theater an der Wien, Vienna: 1-3 June

Schauspielhaus, Zurich: 5-6 June

Grand, Leeds: 26-31 July
Cambridge Theatre, London: 5 August - 2 October
Televised on BBC 2 in March 1972, directed by David Giles

THE TIMES MONDAY MARCH 29 1971

The 'Olivier from Wigan' finds that after an hour on stage as Hamlet he is all too ready for the death scene
Ian McKellen joins the Shakespearian acting elite
By Peter Waymaric

On the first night of Hamlet at the Nottingham Playhouse last week, Robert Chetwyn, the director, went into the lavatory and heard his production being dismissed as "damned teenage twaddle". Ian McKellen, who is 30 and plays Hamlet, was pleased to be thought of as a teenager. After the third performance about 100 young people stood shouting and clapping their approval and this pleased Mr. McKellen even more. "It looks as if we have a controversial Hamlet, he said. "Now we will have to be ready for the national critics not liking it".

Hamlet is Mr. McKellen's biggest challenge since his Edward II and Richard II sent the press into raptures two years ago, putting him with the great Shakespearian actors and giving him labels such as "The new Olivier from Wigan" (where Mr. McKellen was brought up). He says that the praise was overdone and he is waiting for the reaction: "They are going to say: We knew it could not last. We knew it was a trick'."

Mr. McKellen says he thinks the Hamlet is the best thing he has done and whatever the critics say it is the audience that matters. On the evidence of advance bookings enthusiasm is building up nicely. Every performance at Nottingham was sold out in January and people have been writing to Mr McKellen from other towns where the production is playing, begging for tickets.

Mr. McKellen had several offers to do Hamlet but chose to remain faithful to the touring Prospect Company which gave him the opportunity with Richard and Edward. So instead of the London opening he could have had, he will spend the coming weeks treading the boards at Aberdeen, Glasgow and Wolverhampton.

There is a definite idealism about this but also a genuine appreciation of provincial audiences, as shown in the case of two middle-aged ladies who went up to Mr. McKellen at Nottingham to say how much they had enjoyed the play.

"They had never seen Shakespeare in the theatre and they came because they had seen Richard II on 'the box'.

"I asked whether they understood the story all right. One of them said she bought the book and could not make anything of it. But having seen the play she understood it perfectly."

It is appropriate that Hamlet has opened in Nottingham where Mr. McKellen's career was effectively launched eight years ago when he played in Coriolanus under Sir Tyrone Guthrie. Soon afterwards his first West End appearance in A Scent of Flowers won an award and an invitation from Sir Laurence Olivier to join the National Theatre. But he resigned after nine months.

"There were a number of actors of my age and range in the company and there was a sense of competition which I as a socialist did not find helpful. I thought I would have better opportunities elsewhere." Now he is much better known than any of those National Theatre rivals.

He had two more successes in the West End, played in Arnold Wesker's Their Very Own and Golden City and then found the Prospect Company. He is proud of the fact that whatever fame he has earned has come almost entirely from the reaction of provincial theatre audiences. Nor, unlike many of his contemporaries, has he been much attracted by films and television in spite of the much greater financial rewards.

He says: "I used to take it personally that I was never asked to do films but the big enjoyment there is not for the actors but for directors and administrators. These are the people in charge. In the theatre the people in charge in the end are the actors, and their relationship with the audience is what makes their success or failure. What keeps the theatre pure is that it is not a commodity to be reproduced and marketed throughout the world." And so to Hamlet. Mr. McKellen says they have no fancy interpretation to offer; the play is quite difficult enough without that. But this is broadly how they're seeing it: Hamlet is first shown as an extremely depressed little boy finding everything possible wrong with the world. Then he sees the ghost of his father which, Mr McKellen says, is a "mind-blowing experience"; in the main body of the play Hamlet shows himself ready and fitted for the job in hand.

Mr. McKellen says he finds playing Hamlet more exhausting than he thought he would." There is a passage where you are on stage for an hour. You are the machine for every theme and you have to fuel that machine somehow. Then right at the end you have got to do all that bloody fighting. You are certainly ready for death after that." It takes him three hours to unwind after each performance.

The production is going to Vienna and Rome in the summer and probably to eastern Europe and will later be seen on television. I asked Mr. McKellen what he was doing after that: "I hadn't even thought about it. Nothing at all. What a depressing question."

Hamlet on television
by Peter Fiddick

There would be little point in my merely adding my voice to the considerable chorus of praise which has greeted the Prospect Productions Hamlet and Ian McKellen's Hamlet within it. It was evident from Saturday night's version of it on BBC-2 that both were substantial achievements. Hamlet is a very big play, perfection is a very difficult thing, and like several one has seen, this did bits of it better than ever, though without necessarily leaving one thinking "That was the greatest." What I was left thinking, indeed, was probably a little unfair on the overall effect, since the end was curiously flawed - a fight and deaths so emphatically melodramatic that it was a surprise to see William Nobbs name on the credits, and a sense of uncertainty in handling Fortinbras's closing scene.

Still, it was overall a distinguished piece or work, with a fine Prince, a solid Claudius from John Woodvine, moments of splendour from Faith Brook's Gertrude, and from Susan Fleetwood an Ophelia that must join her totally contrasting performance as the passionate acid-thrower in last week's "Country Matters" in at last imprinting her talents on television producers' memories.

But perhaps the greatest achievement of the night was the strictly television one. The actors, after all, had mostly had months of work in their parts. David Giles, directing for the BBC, had the unenviable task of making Robert Chetwyn's already successful stage production into television, and his success was virtually complete.

The most obviously technical device was the bold approach to the soliloquies, shot in very tight close-up, often with McKellen's mouth out of view as he spoke, giving a much stronger effect of internalisation than the prerecorded voice over an unspeaking head we see so much these days. But this was just a part - one always had a sense of something that had been done for the cameras, and from the performers as well.

I will never say a bad word against ATV for doing the play in their two-hour version with Richard Chamberlain but I did say at the time that serialisation might have been the better television answer. Shakespeare's was best of all.