IAN McKELLEN in interview with Gordon Gow
Ian
McKellen in the title role of Prospect's Richard
II which began at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival before coming to London. 'I'm
certainly not the kind of actor who is confident enough of his own insight into
life to think that I could ever do without a director'
Photograph
Michael Peto
THE
DECORATIVE elements in Ian McKellen's house in London
have obviously been chosen with thought and purpose. Two of them which
especially strike a responsive chord in me are merely postcard‑size
photographs, but of just the right people: the head and shoulders of Judi Dench; the inclining figure of Buster Keaton,
leaning out from the rigging and scanning the horizon in The Navigator. McKellen, in his own fashion, is apt to look ahead
of himself and chart the course. After studying English at Cambridge he went
into rep for three years‑-at Coventry, Ipswich and Nottingham‑-with
a determination that he would resist any lure to come to London during that
period.
With
time, after his dual success for Prospect in the title roles of Edward II and Richard II (which began at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival and
subsequently, of course, drew packed houses in London, first at the Mermaid and
later at the Piccadilly) lures to do more tempting stage roles were naturally
profuse. 'And I suppose I made another big decision then,' he says, 'which was
not to wait around any longer for films.' His few film appearances have not
been in crowd‑pullers. He was wanted by Tony Richardson for the lead in
Ned Kelly‑which Mick Jagger ultimately did but
that was no box office winner either. So the cinema, in the foreseeable future,
will probably have to do without him. On the other hand, The Actors' Company
seems apt to claim him again sometime, since its spirit of equality appeals to
him strongly.
'There
was another of my conscious decisions-‑for me,
The Actors' Company was a matter of withdrawing from a situation and trying to
improve things.' But for the moment he is with the RSC for the current Doctor Faustus and the forthcoming
production of Wedekind's The Marquis of Keith. 'This was simply a decision about wanting to
play two particular parts and to work with two specific directors: I'd worked
before with John Barton as an undergraduate, but never with Ronald Eyre. In
terms of my career, though, it isn't a change of course.'
One of
the reasons advanced for the popularity of the Richard and Edward season was
that in McKellen the public could acclaim a new and especially vibrant star, at
a period when stars had been less plentiful than in the past. At the time,
however, the actor himself was unaware that he was making quite this kind of
impact.
I
genuinely didn't know, while all that was going on, what a success it was
despite all the ballyhoo and the interviews I gave and the full houses. I think
everybody in the company just accepted that we were doing the productions very
well, and we thought they deserved to have the attention they got. It was only
afterwards, in the spring of 1971 when I did Hamlet on tour, that suddenly I realised that people had heard of me. So it was then, and
subsequently coming to London with it, that I knew I was in a privileged
position as an actor. And I hope I've been able to make some good use of it in
helping to start The Actors' Company. But while it was going on during that
Richard and Edward run I was blessedly unaware of it, or else I might have
turned into a quite horrific person. I got a great deal of overpraise,
I think, looking back ‑but at the time I was just enjoying myself.
'The sort
of criticism which descends to saying that someone is a star, or an actor has
been discovered or something, rings rather sour when the actor's been plugging
away turning in reasonably good work in a variety of places‑ for the
preceding six years. One says, "Oh yes? Just arrived? Hmmmm?" What I mean by overpraise is talking about an actor as if he'd suddenly
had God's finger placed on his head or something ridiculous like that. I would
much rather have been praised because a critic or somebody in the audience had
understood the hard work that had gone into the creation of a part.'
I felt
bound to recall that he had received good notices in 1964 for A Scent of Flowers and in 1966 for A Lily in Little India, and more
especially for his memorable work in the three‑hander from Russia, The Promise by Aleksei
Arbuzov, which he shared with Judi Dench and Ian McShane in 1967. He
smiles at the rebuke and says, 'I'm not grumbling. It's just that the amount of
attention one gets now, all the praise and talk, does seem irrelevant to the
job one's doing: arriving it the theatre on time, getting on well with the
other people in the company, keeping the standards up constantly‑or
trying to, only too aware yourself that you're maybe dropping back in some
direction although maybe improving in others. And that amount of effort is
ignored in the general wash of "A star has arrived on the horizon!"‑which
is a lack of appreciation of the real qualities that one cares about oneself.'
In a
sense he makes the task sound a primarily introspective one, but he is eager to
emphasise that he relies very much upon direction.
'It's a misconception of The Actors' Company's aims that we ever wanted to
denigrate a director's impact on a production. Our only plea was that the actor
should be allowed to share in the director's initial thinking, so that having
been privy to his early thoughts you should understand the relevance of what he
was saying when you got into production.
'Now as a
leading actor playing in Doctor Faustus or The Marquis of Keith or whatever, I
am of course privy to the director's intentions. Ronald Eyre isn't going to
direct The Marquis of Keith against
my interests or abilities because then the play isn't going to work. But I would
like it to become much more a recognised thing that
actors and directors get together in respect of small roles as well as leads,
much earlier in the process. I lean very much on a director, whose training is
to see the whole, in a way that an actor's training isn't. With that kind of
relationship, though, the selfish part of acting, concentrating on your own
performance, will be put in a proper setting against the significance of the
entire play. When it comes down to rehearsal, of course, one's drawing very
much upon one's own resources and experience. But I'm certainly not the kind of
actor who is confident enough of his own insight into life to think that I
could ever do without a director.'
Having
directed more than once himself ‑The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Liverpool Playhouse,
A Private Matter at the Vaudeville‑he
vows he would never act in and direct the same production: 'Dread the idea. I'd
find it impossible. But if you are directing a play and are
therefore required to be objective, that's a very good discipline indeed.
That's helped my acting enormously.'
It must
be good for other actors, one tends to think, to be directed by a man who is
himself an actor. But McKellen indicates dangers here: 'The actor who's doing
the directing must restrain himself and not leap up on stage and say, "Of
course, what you want to do here is that"--‑no
actor wants to be shown in such a manner, except in extreme cases. A director's
there to stick pins in and to flash up signs and get the actor's imagination going.
And often if an actor's a director he can use a sort of shorthand that other
directors who haven't acted can't use.
'Another
reason why I, as an actor, rely on a director is because, although I want to be
self‑critical, I find it very difficult to be objective about my own
work. When I see myself on telly I'm often
excruciated. I think to myself, "How on earth did you happen to do
that?" I have often asked directors, lest they should feel inhibited as
some do, not to hesitate to be very basic in their criticism. That's partly why
I wanted to work with John Barton and Ron Eyre, who are both very gentle and
sympathetic people, but at the same time I know that both of them are tough
enough, and care enough about their own work and the plays they're doing, to
say "That won't do" for this reason or that. They won't let me get
away with the easy way out or the old way out. They will always be pushing me
further.
'I find I
very rarely have arguments with directors, and I think it's because I manage to
get in early enough to be in tune with their thinking, so there almost never
comes a moment when I don't know what they're talking about or they don't know
what I'm talking about.'
Once a
play has started its run, McKellen paces himself carefully during the day in
constant preparation for the evening's performance. 'I make a point of having a
sleep in the afternoon. Depending on the part. When I
was doing ten lines in Feydeau's Ruling the Roost with The Actors' Company, I didn't bother to go to
sleep on those afternoons. That was quite a luxury. But with Faustus I always sleep for an hour
beforehand. Put ear‑plugs in if I'm sleeping in the theatre
dressing-room. Set the alarm. Ideally I would go to sleep at half past four, wake
at half past five, have something to eat for energy, and then start making up.
Or else I do my sleeping at home and then it's only ten minutes ride to the Aldwych on my moped. No, eleven minutes door to door.
'When a
play has been running for a long time, I make a conscious decision each day
along the lines of, "Well, tonight I will try and get that bit better--or different. Let me see, for example, if an
upward inflection to my voice would get a bigger laugh than if I threw it
away". And if that laugh should happen, then you know from that tiny
moment that the performance is an improvement on the last one. It's just a way
of keeping one's discipline.
'Emrys
But how
does an actor of sensitivity eradicate the chance irritation, the unexpectedly
provoking remark, that might perchance come his way
before a performance? 'Well, you can't always manage it. The thing that upsets
me most, funnily enough, is if I go and see a film in the afternoon. One would
think it would be a nice relaxing, escaping experience. And indeed it is. But
the impression is likely to linger; and if you come out of the cinema at five
and have a performance at half past seven, your attention is somehow still with
the film you've seen. That's a bigger hazard than if you've had a flaming row
with somebody, which you've got out of your system.
'But the
matter of routine‑the fact that you're going to say the same lines with
the same people in the same situation, you're going to have half an hour making
up, you're going to have a cup of tea before you go on, you're going to sit in
the wings for five minutes‑all that shoves the engine on to its track,
and regardless of what's happened at the station that you've just left before
the performance, you know the scenery's going to be the same en route, and
hopefully you're going to reach the destination as you always do.'
Fallibility
has been common to several of the characters McKellen has played. As opposed,
say, to the heroic surge of a Henry V
(a role he undertook once in rep), he tends to bend our sympathies towards the
short‑comings of Richard and Edward and Hamlet and now Faustus, although
some critics have rebuked him for not making the latter figure noble enough.
'Well now, of course, I don't find him a very noble person. His intentions may
be high‑minded early on in the play, but they are very soon corrupted,
and he falls very quickly into something much less than his intentions. That's
true of many great figures, CorioIanus, Macbeth. They
may all be striving‑to be better than they are, but it's in the nature of
their failing to reach the heights that we understand and care about them.'