Theatre review: Ian McKellen on Stage - With Tolkien, Shakespeare, others...and you!

A couple of years ago Ian McKellen did a series of gala shows as a fundraiser for the Park Theatre, and with 2019 marking his 80th year he’s decided to revive that performance for a wider audience. This time around he’s doing 80 performances, each on a different stage across the country, with the proceeds going to the theatres or to a charity or community project associated with them. A couple of the venues have a few seats whose prices don’t break the bank, so I caught up with the awkwardly-titled Ian McKellen on Stage - With Tolkien, Shakespeare, others...and you! at the Arts Theatre. Many of the theatres on the tour have a personal connection to McKellen, and in the case of the Arts it’s where he made his amateur West End debut in a University show, and where he decided (after a particularly glowing review) to try it professionally. He says he can show you the exact paving stone outside the theatre where he made the decision.

As well as location-specific anecdotes there’s more general ones from his life and career, themed more around different writers whose work has been important to him, than in chronological order.

So the show opens with him midway through reading a passage from Lord of the Rings, and although Tolkien features in the title, McKellen has said he’s getting him out of the way early on. It’s also where the promised opportunity for the audience to join him on stage comes – one audience member to be precise, who gets to pose for a selfie with McKellen and his sword prop from the films. He’s respectful of the job that got him his biggest fanbase, but it’s clear this isn’t the part of his career he’s most enthusiastic about himself, and in a recurring gag the fact that people he respects re-read the books annually baffles him. He moves on to the story of him falling in love with theatre and his early professional work, but the whole second act is devoted to Shakespeare: He challenges the audience to name the complete works, and responds to some with his thoughts and opinions, to others with extracts.

Sean Mathias directs the show into some kind of structure, but there’s inevitably moments when the actor’s attention drifts a bit – tonight he paid tribute to the recently-deceased Albert Finney, and needed his flashcards to help him find his place in the show again (although I can’t completely discount the possibility that the flashcards are an elaborate setup to a gag later in the evening.) McKellen is as you’d expect him, affable (except when the issue of people spelling it “McKellan” comes up,) and chatty. He gives us his Hamlet, his Macbeth, and most importantly his Twankey, and then his Aufidius staring lovingly at his Coriolanus. At 80 he’s still remarkably in control of the stage, and especially given he’s doing it for charity there’s nobody you’d say deserves the indulgence of this tour more than McKellen. The Two Noble Kinsmen isn’t bloody Apocrypha though, I’m not having that, Serena or no Serena.

Ian McKellen on Stage - With Tolkien, Shakespeare, others...and you! is booking at various venues until the 15th of September (most dates returns only.)

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Douet.