Sir Ian McKellen at the Guthrie

Monday night I had the privilege of attending Joe Dowling's conversation with Sir Ian McKellen on the Guthrie's thrust stage, which was a fantastic good time. Obviously a few other people thought so since it was a full house of 1100, and simulcast to an audience in the proscenium stage as well. This is part of why they built the funky new modern building, so they can do cool stuff like this, despite Sir Ian's mild protest at the end of the evening that it didn't feel right to be using a microphone in Sir Tyrone Guthrie's theater.

Having seen Sir Ian McKellen on stage in Richard III at the Ordway and Dance of Death (which is that poster hanging on my wall) and on film in Gods and Monsters, which despite an Oscar is about the most tragically underrated film of all time, and having seen the incredible work in Joe Dowling's run as creative director of the Guthrie, including his own production of The Home Place that's currently running, I was really excited about this. I've generally found both of these guys fascinating people in their insights about their craft, and some of Sir Ian displayed that particular mix of intellectual gravitas mixed with bawdy juvenilia that has made Monty Python and Blackadder like crack to adolescent nerds, proof that there is somebody out there who speaks your language. For instance Joe Dowling referred us to www.mckellen.com, which is actually a pretty cool website detailing his career in pictures and his own words, and the years of e-posts in response to questions are really cool, and a bit to Joe's embarrassment, Sir Ian helpfully added that the porn on his website is really quite discreet.

Some of his most interesting comments on the theater over the course of the evening were about actresses, and after describing the pressure of playing in Stratford following in the footsteps of Lawrence Olivier, he went on to give his opinion that of his generation, the names likely to reverberate were not men like himself or Derek Jacobi or Alan Bates, but some of the women like Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, claiming we were living in “the era of great actresses”. This was also interesting when he got into a discussion with a girl playing also playing Lear in an obviously open-minded production, and he got on the topic of the lack of great roles for women in theatre, concluding that when Judi Dench asked him where was her Lear, the grand definitive part for an actress, he should have suggested that she just strap her breasts down and play Lear herself.

There was something intriguing in contrast to that remark, and to his whole general thrust that the rediscovery of Shakespeare in each new production or interpretation was the joy of it, like discovering the first time he played Romeo that the balcony scene is quite overwrought and funny when viewed from the audience's perspective. His counter-example to his general opposition towards encumbering traditionalism was when he claimed one cannot understand Twelfth Night without seeing it performed by an all-male cast. (Having first seen it as a high school musical, and later as Ken Branagh's grey-washed tragedy, I feel I may have come nowhere near understanding it.) Having done so much of it, he gave us one other interesting perspective about Shakespeare, talking about the roles he didn't want to play, the “easy” parts in Shakespeare, like Hotspur, Mercutio, and Puck, which struck me as a strong statement considering they are, or certainly can be, pretty memorable parts. His claim was though that there is no real challenge to them for an actor, and as a result you almost never see a bad performance in those roles... I couldn't help but think of the dreadful SoCal Romeo+Juliet in which about the only watchable performance is Harold Perrineau's Mercutio, and realize he was right.

It's really from their conversation about Tyrone Guthrie that I understood how much the character of the whole discussion, casual and funny but reaching for something higher than reverence and gossip, was really in keeping with its setting in the theater with Sir Tyrone's visage looming sternly over 2nd street. I hadn't realized that Sir Ian McKellen's start in theater was at Guthrie's theater in Nottingham, but he talked at length about working under Guthrie. Sir Ian described Sir Tyrone's particular attitude towards both great actors and great theaters as “iconoclastic”, which formed his belief that the theaters he founded in Nottingham and Minneapolis could challenge the establishment in London and New York, and that they needed that constant challenge if they were going to really be great artistic centers. This really echoes the birth of original American theatre when The Emperor Jones was performed on a wharf in Provincetown in 1920, a revolutionary play performed out on Cape Cod (during another era of safe commercial melodrama in New York) that later would be performed around the globe.

On that theme McKellen also lamented some of the great directors whose unconventionality and innovation required that they leave Britain to establish themselves, effectively producing amazing work everywhere but the West End. His first truly great performance was the open air production of MacBeth he and Judi Dench did with just a circle drawn on the ground to separate the cast and crowd, and the props strewn around the edge, with McKellen (as MacBeth) first appearing to make thunder for the witches in the opening scene, and this reminded me of how happy I have been to have seen some things make it out here to the lonely prairie like the production of MacBeth set in Liberia performed at the Lab a couple of years ago, and how much I have to thank Joe Dowling for that. Although on the topic of the Scottish play, McKellen noted that he was wearing MacBeth's tartan on his tie, and that he had given a similar tie to a delighted Sir Lawrence Olivier... shortly before he died.

He concluded by taking off his mike, or at least turning it down, as if he couldn't countenance performing Shakespeare in Sir Tyrone's house with a booming PA, so he could give us one unique performance. The only Shakespearean part not performed a thousand times in the modern age is a scene the playwright contributed to Sir Thomas More, and that was first performed by none other than Sir Ian McKellen, and he left us with a speech from that play, of which I will only reprint the first part. He chose to give it I believe for greater reasons than vanity, given some of the current anxieties in both British and American political discourse, because in this scene, Thomas More responding to an unruly crowd who are riled up about all the foreigners in England, where someone has just called for “removing the strangers”:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding tooth ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.