To listen, to see, to show off! How Ian McKellen made me the people that I am today
For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends—subjected thus, how can you say to me, I am a king?
I SAW IAN McKELLEN’S famous Richard the Second in 1969, when I was nine, and though I had no idea why, I thought it was pretty great. I’d gone with my dad on my mum’s ticket because she was indisposed. It was agreed, as I understood it, that I had shown good enough form in my prior reactions to both filmed and staged Shakespeare — and not just the stabbing and the arrow storm either — that I was mature enough at nine to cope with the very particular challenges presented by that most subtly tonal of speech-y late-Elizabethan plays. Challenges? In reverse order of awkwardness, they are: the language, then the language and above all, the language.
The play is of course among other things a portrait of vanity, entitlement, delusion, self-pity, presumption, brutish self-interest, sudden insight and awful cruelty. It’s also a reasonable diagram of the metaphysics of late-medieval Governance and, floating glamorously above that, Kingship, Shakespeare’s favourite subject. (One of mine too — it’s one of mine because of Shakespeare.)
But I was nine and I was hardly likely to be getting to grips with themes. Come on, just how precocious do you think I was? Or do you suspect me of making this up?
I hadn’t a clue as to what the pissy king in the gold floor-length tabard was doing, coming down the grand flight of steps in slow motion holding up his hand behind his ear (holding a mirror? Can’t remember now), booming pissily in what was obviously his special voice. “Down, down I come…” I did not get why he, supposedly a king, sat down on the stage in his rather unconvincing armour — actually, he didn’t sit down so much as arrange the armour artfully, with him still in it — and then go on and on about how people do so often treat kings badly. And I am still chuffed, decades later, that I was not traumatised by the ending, where Richard goes mad and is murdered in a dungeon by the employees of the snake Bolingbroke. I really enjoyed it, I really did; much as I’d enjoyed Olivier’s films of Hamlet, Richard III and, especially, Henry V, which I still think, even at the age of sixty-six, is not only a fabulous piece of big-budget propaganda film-making but also a top play. Come on, people: the Duke of Burgundy! The Hostess! The Duke of Exeter, on behalf of Henry, inviting the Dauphin to come on, then, if he thinks he’s hard enough:
“Scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt, / And any thing that may not misbecome / The mighty sender, doth he prize you at.”
I mean, come on. How can you not want to say that? Think of the drag you can apply to “prize”, “you” and “at”.
Above all, I really enjoyed the unending river of words, as it flowed differently from different people’s mouths, with hills and valleys and a topography of meaning within their contours that you might guess at while swimming in the river. Or just float on your back and listen to the sound of it. I hadn’t a clue what most of them meant — of course I hadn’t — but I have always known a good groove when I’m in one, and Shakey’s grooves know some deep, deep pockets.
I liked Shakespeare so much that I studied Drama as an academic subject at university. I got in on the basis of an interview in which I made a stretchy comparison between the performance aesthetic of the then-maturing punk group the Clash and the Russian film director Kosintsev’s Hamlet. It was 1979 and you had to do that sort of thing. And then on the course you had to do some acting (obvs) to understand how to release the life in the text, make the music in the language really sing (as the middle-brows say — you’ll never hear me say that). So I tentatively tried acting for the first time and after half a dozen goes, began to get a grip and enjoyed it. I even thought immodestly that I was quite good as an aged Peer Gynt.
Ibsen though.
A sort of inadequate fulfilment was found in the final examinations in 1982 with a do-it-off-the-premises paper always referred to as ‘The Shakespeare Takeaway’. I took it away, did mine in the daytime and then sat up all night helping my girlfriend do hers. People get so fried by Shakespeare.
The last knockings were my role in a play called The Dog in the Manger by the Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega, never before performed in English. Terrific, it was, and it won the National Student Drama Festival, the prize being a week’s run in London’s glittering Euston Road at the Shaw Theatre. I’d been a spooky major-domo in the first production but was recast in London as a dorky lovelorn servant-fool called, I think, Fabio — though he might have as easily been named Franco Spencero. I wasn’t great. But to my amazement— and no doubt also to that of the rest of the cast, and director — The Times thought I was rather good. One of the two best performances in it, in fact.
I literally gasped when I read this and I must confess that my head was turned. It did a full owlish 360-degree rotation, and then another one, stopping half way. When the brain inside eventually ceased spinning, I considered at length the once-unthinkable: yes, I would launch myself into London’s thespian hive. I would become an actor.
Maybe then some fucker would cast me in a Shakespeare play.
I DIDN’T DO IT. I stood on the brink, quivering, for a summer and an autumn, turning things over with great solemnity. And in due course I turned away and didn’t do it. Because I knew that were I to engage in a year or two’s stiff training at a decent drama school, I’d come out the other end better equipped as an actor, but not a better actor. I knew I was pretty ordinary. I saw myself in regional rep doing an excellently punctilious Fortinbras and perhaps even a decent and quite unusual Polonius (I was always quite good at old blokes). Caliban? Yuzz. I can do squalid, feral, smelly. Prospero? Probably not. Falstaff? Not a gnat’s chance in a kiln. At my absolute peak I might cop a Bardolph in a Henriad somewhere, but much more likely Justice Shallow, probably in Gloucestershire. I had the knobbly knees at least.
It was the correct decision.
I did not want to be an actor, even though I did want to be an actor. I did not want to traipse the length and breadth of the Kingdom knowing that it would never be mine, as it is Judi Dench’s. I even had a passion that exceeded my appetite for Shakespeare (now there’s an interesting thing: I just went to write “my love of Shakespeare”, and I couldn’t: I could not write that balls-achingly awful phrase that people use when they’re on Radio Four and they lightly touch their sternum with their fingertips and plunge into a whole new register of sincerity: “of course, I cannot ever ignore my love of the Bard.” Never, never, never will I write those five words, not in that order.)
So, here’s me, in 1983, on the brink of my life, doing the maths.
Shakespeare? I am a crap actor and I must learn for the good of my faith in life to suppress my love of the Bard. The Bill would have always been my level really. And if you are gifted, as I am, with the talent for lying very, very still, then you can always be The Body. Furthermore, such are the virtues of modern make-up, wigs, prosthetics, clever lighting etc that you don’t always have to be the same one. It has a harsh lesson to teach, though, that unstill body which is also you: stillness goes to the very heart of the job. And acting has a lot to do with finding that stillness inside yourself.
Cricketer? Who are you kidding. Play for England? Get outta here. You dealt with that one when you were fifteen. NO!
Pirate radio DJ? Well, that was fun and meaningful for a while, but it wasn’t called pirate radio because of the salaries it paid. Ever heard the expression “spinning your wheels”? No pun intended of course.
Anyway, after two or three years of fiddling about and doing proper work, I began to write about music and not quite overnight I became a music journalist. And then not quite overnight again I got fed up with that and became a newspaper journalist and was stuck with that for years and years, until rather too late for my good health another almost-overnight situation occurred and I found myself writing books and training to be a psychotherapist. Which is what I am now.
OR AM I? Well, there is a question that old Wm Shakespeare would have explored with some acuity, not to say relish. Appearance and Reality. They are not always the same thing, you see. I hold up my hand flat behind my ear as I descend the staircase of my life, and it is a mirror.
And it is my hand.
And it is a mirror.
Do you see? It is both. Both a hand and a mirror. My hand, your mirror.
Your hand, my mirror! Do you see?
For the simple truth is that I am both. I am an actor, I am a writer, I am a psychotherapist. I am, er, all three of those things and I always have been.
I do have a special voice which comes out on apt occasion — I am using it now. Can you hear? I love to tell stories. My greatest joy is to entertain as it is also my privilege to inform and hold stuff up to scrutiny — and with fell purpose when needs must. But to help others to see for themselves? That has been all of my life. To listen. To see. And to show off just a little. Not too much. Just the right amount.
Do you see?
This piece was first published at Not Another Cycling Forum at NOTANOTHERCYCLINGFORUM.NET
Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press