Ian McKellen on King Lear (Shakespeare On Stage)

By Ian McKellen and Julian Curry

Ian McKellen discusses playing King Lear, in this ebook taken from Shakespeare On Stage: Volume 2 - Twelve Leading Actors on Twelve Key Roles.
In each volume of the Shakespeare On Stage series, a leading actor takes us behind the scenes of a landmark Shakespearean production, recreating in detail their memorable performance in a major role. They leads us through the choices they made in rehearsal, and how the character works in performance, shedding new light on some of the most challenging roles in the canon. The result is a series of individual masterclasses that will be invaluable for other actors and directors, as well as students of Shakespeare – and fascinating for audiences of the plays.
In this volume, Ian McKellen discusses playing one of Shakespeare's most demanding roles, King Lear, in Trevor Nunn's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2007.
This interview, together with the others in the series (with actors such as Alan Rickman, Simon Russell Beale, Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter), is also available in the collection Shakespeare On Stage: Volume 2 - Twelve Leading Actors on Twelve Key Roles by Julian Curry, with a foreword by Nicholas Hytner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Apr 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780018911

Ian McKellen

Sir Ian McKellen is an English actor who has received over fifty international acting awards during more than half a century on stage and screen. His roles as Magneto in the X-Men films and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies brought him internation recognition. On the stage he has won many Olivier Awards for his performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, including Macbeth (1976-78), Wild Honey (1984), Richard III (1990), as well as his work with Patrick Stewart in Pinter's No Man's Land and Beckett's Waiting for Godot, on Broadway in 2013. In 2009 he was given the award for Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre.

Book preview

Ian McKellen

on

King Lear

King Lear (1605–6)

Royal Shakespeare Company

Opened at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 31 May 2007

Directed by Trevor Nunn

Designed by Christopher Oram

With Frances Barber as Goneril, Monica Dolan as Regan, Romola Garai as Cordelia, William Gaunt as the Earl of Gloucester, Jonathan Hyde as the Earl of Kent, Sylvester McCoy as the Fool, Ben Meyjes as Edgar, and Philip Winchester as Edmund

King Lear was written around 1605, between Othello and Macbeth, when Shakespeare was at the height of his powers. It was subsequently revised, and therefore two distinct versions exist. The earlier text was published, rather badly, in quarto in 1608. The later, a slightly shorter and more theatrical version, was included in the 1623 First Folio. Editors and theatre directors often conflate the two.

‘No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear,’ wrote Bernard Shaw, and A.C. Bradley called King Lear ‘Shakespeare’s greatest achievement’. However, it has not always been popular. After the English Civil War the play fell out of fashion. Its portrayal of abject cruelty and senseless brutality was too painful for audiences to bear. In 1681 Nahum Tate produced a sentimentalised reworking of the play, giving it a happy ending in which Lear and Cordelia are left alive and she marries Edgar. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, audiences preferred this version. But since the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s original has been regarded as one of his supreme achievements. By the 1960s, following the Holocaust and the two World Wars, the graphic violence no longer appeared far-fetched. Gloucester’s line ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport’ [4.1] seemed in tune with the times. Peter Brook’s iconic 1962 production was influenced by the critic Jan Kott, who compared King Lear to the ravaged scenarios of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Waiting for Godot, commenting that ‘the abyss, into which one can jump, is everywhere’.

The mainspring of the play is Lear’s folly in passing control of his kingdom to Goneril and Regan, moved by their flattery, and disinheriting Cordelia – the daughter who truly loves him. This sets in motion the tragic events that follow. Goneril and Regan betray their father and throw him out into the cold. The homeless Lear wilfully exposes himself to a thunderstorm, comparing nature’s mercilessness to his daughters’ treatment of him. Regan’s husband Cornwall plucks out Gloucester’s eyes; war erupts between England and France; Goneril poisons her sister Regan in jealous rivalry over Gloucester’s bastard son Edmund, and then kills herself. Cordelia is put to death by order of her sister’s lover, causing Lear to die of a broken heart. His entire family ends up