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[HUM OF CONVERSATION]
(♪ 'Bridge of Khazad Dum')
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
IAN MCKELLEN: Look ahead! The bridge is near. It is dangerous and narrow.
Suddenly Frodo saw before him a black chasm.
At the end of the hall, the floor vanished
and fell to an unknown depth.
The outer door could only be reached by a slender bridge of stone,
without kerb or rail, that spanned the chasm
in one curving spring of 50 feet.
At the brink, Gandalf halted and the others came up in a pack behind.
"Lead the way, Gimli: Pippin and Merry next.
"Straight on and up the stair beyond the door!"
Something was coming up behind them.
What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow,
in the middle of which was a dark form,
of man-shape maybe, yet greater:
and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.
It came to the edge of the fire. The light faded,
as if a cloud had bent over it.
And then with a rush, it leapt across the fissure.
And the flames roared up to greet it and wreathed about it.
In its right hand was a blade
like a stabbing tongue of fire.
In its other hand, it held a whip of many thongs.
"A Balrog," muttered Gandalf.
"Now I understand!"
And he faltered and leaned heavily on his staff.
The dark figure streaming with fire raced towards them.
"Over the bridge!" cried Gandalf, recalling his strength.
"Fly! This is a foe beyond any of you.
"I must hold the narrow way.
"Fly!"
The Balrog reached the bridge
and Gandalf stood in the middle of the span,
leaning on the staff in his left hand: but in his other hand,
Glamdring gleamed cold and white.
His enemy halted again, facing him,
the shadow about it stretched out like two vast wings.
It raised its whip. The thongs whined and cracked.
Fire came from its nostrils.
But still Gandalf stood firm. "You cannot pass!"
A dead silence fell.
"I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor.
"You cannot pass.
"The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.
"Go back to the shadow.
"You cannot pass."
The Balrog made no answer.
It stepped forward slowly on to the bridge
and suddenly raised itself to a great height
and its wings were spread from wall to wall.
But still Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom.
Then from out of the shadow, a red sword leaped, flaming.
Glamdring glittered white in answer.
There was a ringing clash, a stab of white fire.
And the Balrog fell back and its sword flew up in molten fragments.
And then with a bound, it leapt full upon the bridge.
Its whip whirled and hissed.
And at that moment Gandalf, crying aloud,
smote the bridge before him.
"You shall not pass!"
And a blinding sheet of white flame sprang up.
The bridge cracked.
Right at the Balrog's feet it broke
and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf.
And with a terrible cry, the Balrog fell forward,
its shadow plunged down and vanished.
But even as it fell, it swung its whip
and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's knees,
dragging him to the brink.
He staggered and fell,
grasped vainly at the stone
and slid into the abyss.
"Fly, you fools!"
And was gone.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
[CHEERING]
Hello. Thank you.
Just in case you didn't realise,
before it was made into all those movies, Lord of the Rings used to be a book.
[LAUGHTER]
And Tolkien was writing that chapter,
I think in Oxford, just about the time I was getting ready to be born
up north in the county of Lancashire.
J R R...
John, Ronald... What does the other R for, do you know?
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Reuel. ― Reuel, yes.
It means friend of God. Do you know what Tolkien means?
[SILENCE]
It means foolhardy.
And I did perhaps wonder whether I wasn't being a bit little foolhardy
when Peter Jackson came over to my house,
it was 21 years ago, to ask me to play Gandalf,
because at that time, there was no screenplay, no script.
And to tell you the truth...
..I'd never read Lord of the Rings.
[LAUGHTER]
Of course, ever since,
I've been shamed by family and friends and strangers who have.
And some of them confide almost reverentially,
"I read Lord of the Rings every year!"
[LAUGHTER]
It's 1,137 pages.
It the first week of the millennium.
I'd just arrived in New Zealand,
in the capital city, Wellington, to start filming,
and Peter Jackson, who's a sociable fellow,
took us all out for a welcoming meal.
That's how I met for the first time the four adorable hobbits.
And the glamorous three ―
Aragorn, Boromir and...Legolas.
And sitting next to me, a rival wizard, Saruman.
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee...
..the veteran of 200 movies,
ten of which were Count Dracula.
And quite early on in the meal,
Christopher Lee turned his eyes in my direction.
I promise you, they were gleaming as if he was contemplating a virgin neck.
And then he confided, "I read Lord of the Rings every year.
"I've always thought I should play Gandalf."
Look, welcome to the Harold Pinter Theatre.
Good to have a theatre named after a playwright. Look at it.
Built 140 years ago.
And one of the first actors on this stage was the actor/manager Herbert Beerbohm,
and after here, he went round the corner to Her Majesty's Theatre
and ran a company there for seven years,
made so much money that he built a theatre bang opposite His Majesty's.
And he lived there and put on his famous extravagant productions of Shakespeare.
He was thought to be a bit old-fashioned,
but no, rather up to date.
He founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
He was the first actor ever to have his voice recorded.
He made the first film of Shakespeare.
Well, just a short one ― an extract from King John.
It was a silent movie.
[LAUGHTER]
And Shakespeare without the words is a bit...
It's a bit like Mozart without the music.
Beerbohm's a German name,
and he thought perhaps the Brits would like something a little bit simpler.
And so he translated the last syllable into English
and it became Sit Herbert Beerbohm...
Tree.
And he must have stood...
..just where I am now.
And many other wonderful actors.
Not me. First time I've been on this stage.
I've sat out there on many happy occasions.
I've been on the road.
I've been visiting theatres I know well,
and a few that I don't know at all.
This is my skip, my box.
This is what actors used to have when they went on the road.
They were usually made of wicker.
You kept your costumes in them, props, things you'd need on the road.
And there are the places that we've been to.
87 theatres.
And the first one was only last year,
at my local arts centre on the Isle of Dogs.
Then 15 theatres in London and then round England and Wales.
And we ended up, beautifully, in Orkney.
Oh, and we went to Northern Ireland.
Yep, there we are ― the Braid.
That's in Ballymena in County Antrim,
which is where the McKellens come from.
We were bequeathed this dreadful surname...
..that few people outside County Antrim can spell properly.
Just for the record, it's capital M, small C,
capital K, E-L-L-E-N.
E-N!
It's not A-N. and of course, it doesn't really matter, but I used to think it did.
And I wondered whether I shouldn't adopt a stage name
like Sir Herbert's.
Then I remembered working with the actor Timothy Carlton,
just after his wife had given birth to their first child, Benedict.
And Tim said to me one day, "You know, my real surname, it's not Carlton at all.
"It's Cumberbatch."
He said, "Can you imagine trying to have a success as an actor if you're...?"
[APPLAUSE]
And on there somewhere is Home,
which is the wonderful name for the newest theatre built in Manchester,
which is where the McKellens emigrated to.
♪ Unpack the luggage
♪ La la la... ♪
Hi-ho, the glamorous life!
Really what I could do with is a table.
Oh, look here!
[LAUGHTER]
My director, Sean Mathias,
who most recently directed me in No Man's Land by...
Harold Pinter...
during rehearsals for this said,
"Ian, wouldn't it be great, when the audience arrives
"if the box is already there...
"and you're inside it?""
"Sean, what on earth would I be doing inside a box?"
And he said, "Because the audience would like it."
Which is a jolly good reason. But I can't get in there ― there's so much else.
Oh, look!
Here's my precious...
[AUDIENCE GASPS]
That is the real...Glamdring.
Gandalf's sword, given to me on my last day of shooting,
after eight years of hobbity hills and misty mountain ranges.
Glamdring is in retirement now, lives in my hall,
between Magneto's helmet...
..and my two walking-sticks from The Da Vinci Code.
See that little jewel there?
All that writing?
Yeah. More writing there.
That's Elvish.
[LAUGHTER]
Is there a youngster further back
who'd like to come and have a closer look at Glamdring?
Just put your hand up if there is.
Where am I looking?
All right, there's one coming.
Thank you.
You didn't know it was going to be this sort of show, did you?
Hello! What's your name?
― Hello. ― [APPLAUSE]
― What's your name? ― Iljama.
Now just say your name for them.
― Iljama. ― Iljama.
Right, lovely. And this is Glamdring, Iljama.
[LAUGHTER]
― (IAN CHUCKLES) ― You don't trust me!
I do trust...
[LAUGHTER]
We all trust you. It's just it's a bit heavy. There we are.
No, no, I'm going to take that off.
― IAN: Oh! ― AUDIENCE: Ooh!
I've never held a sword before!
― Is it heavy? ― Yeah.
― Good. ― I think you want it back.
[LAUGHTER]
No, you hold onto it for a bit.
― It looks like a sword... ― (DING)
Sounds like a sword, but do you know what?
(AUDIENCE GASPS)
Just hold it in your right hand, Iljama.
And that in the other one. There we are. Are you all right?
I think so!
Would you like a selfie?
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
There we are.
(APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH)
Here we are. Is it working?
There we go.
When you get home, Google Samuel Dunseith McKellen ―
he invented the portable camera.
All right, Iljama. Do you want to pop the sword back in the scabbard for me?
― OK. ― Yeah.
I don't think I'll be able to put it back in.
I think you better...
No, no, no, you...
No, no, no, no, I want you to do it for me.
― OK. ― I'll help you.
All right?
― Thank you. ― There we are.
[APPLAUSE]
― Have you got one of these? ― No.
Well, you do now.
All right. This is as close as I'm going to get to an autobiography.
I wrote it specially for the tour.
It's just an autobiography, really, with...
Those are all the places we went to.
And it's full of photographs. Who's that? Do you know?
― Is it you? ― That's me there.
Who's that one? Don't know?
All right, I won't tell Patrick Stewart.
I-L-J-A-M-A...
― Is that right? ― Yep.
That's right, good.
Well, it's nice to have your name spelled properly,
― isn't it? ― Yes.
There we are, Iljama.
You give me the sword back...
Let's shake hands.
[APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH]
By chance, anyone here born in New Zealand?
― Yes, where? ― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Auckland.
Auckland, where the Orcs come from!
Anyone ever been to New Zealand?
[WHOOPING]
Aren't we the lucky ones?
Anyone ever been on a stamp in New Zealand?
[LAUGHTER]
And a coin?
No, no, that's wasn't me. That was Gandalf.
You know, Iljama...
Iljama, the best day was when...
..this helicopter lifted the nine members of The Fellowship up, up, up...
to the Southern Alps. And off it went,
and the cameraman inside it filmed me
leading the way up this narrow, snowy ridge,
I promise you, up to our knees.
No human being could ever have been there before.
Down here, there was a perilous drop and up there, Mount Cook,
where I knew Edmund Hillary had trained
for the successful ascent of Mount Everest.
He was a bit of a hero in our household.
My dad used to climb in the Lake District and Snowdonia.
Crampons, ropes, all that. And as a treat for me,
they invited Edmund Hillary to come and see us filming.
And it turned out it was going to be a bit of a thrill for him too,
because he was a huge Tolkien fan.
So you can imagine my excitement ―
suddenly there he is at the end of the corridor. The conqueror of Everest.
Six foot three inches tall, a bit stooped now,
like Gandalf, and oh, a lovely long face.
A bit like my dad's, actually ― big jutting jaw.
And he held out his great big paw. And he said,
"I read Lord of the Rings every year."
[LAUGHTER]
(HUMS A TUNE)
♪ For the strength of the hills We bless thee
♪ Our God
♪ Our fathers' God Amen. ♪
I don't go to church any more, but I do miss the hymns.
And as a kid back in Lancashire, in Wigan...
..on a Sunday, hymns all day long.
10:30 in the morning, church service, Sunday School in the afternoon,
then back to church in the evening.
Congregational Church.
And the Congregationalists, as their name implies, are in charge.
They organise everything through their monthly meeting.
There's no hierarchy. They make all the big decisions,
like who's going to be their minister.
And in Romiley in Cheshire, where we've already been with the show...
Yep, there we are ― the Forum, Romiley.
The Congregational Church there
appointed my mother's father to be their minister,
and my dad was a lay preacher.
So was his dad, Grandad McKellen.
And he had a bit of a theatrical bent.
If he felt that the congregation
weren't really paying him quite enough attention,
he'd suddenly say, in the middle of the sermon,
"I can see the children of Israel!"
And half the congregation would fall for it and turn round to look where...
So I come from a family who are at ease...
..with public speaking in the pulpit and the classroom ―
lots of teachers in the family.
My sister Jean, five years older.
She was an English teacher. She married a teacher.
Our Uncle Ken was a teacher ― first one in the family to get to university.
Kenneth Sutcliffe. He ended up as headmaster
of Latymer Upper School for Boys, here in West London,
at a time when Alan Rickman was a student.
And now, look, Uncle Ken was a bit of a stick,
but I checked with Alan and he promised me
he did not base Professor Snape on my uncle.
So we are a family of communicators.
Proselytisers on occasion.
And performers...amateur performers.
My grandmother was a renowned soprano.
And when Grandad McKellen first saw his future wife, she was singing hymns.
Solos for the church choir in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
And he said, "Ian, I fell in love with her voice."
And back in Romiley, when she was a girl...
..my mother used to do a bit of amateur acting with the church players.
And sister Jean...
Oh, well, she was an enthusiastic amateur all her life,
and as a girl, she sang in choirs,
and at home, played duets with Dad on the upright Bechstein in the front room.
And Dad's hands...
A bit like Edmund Hillary's. They were huge!
The fingers...
so thick, sometimes they got stuck between the keys.
A very early memory for me was trying to get to sleep,
and Dad pounding his way through a Chopin sonata on the piano below.
I've got the piano in here somewhere.
[LAUGHTER]
Promise I have. I've got the piano in here because...
..The Piano is a 12-line poem by David Herbert Lawrence.
Look at that ― all those poems by a novelist.
Actually I once played DH Lawrence in the film Priest of love.
[SILENCE]
Which you never saw.
[LAUGHTER]
But if you're a fan of Ava Gardner, have a look at Priest of Love.
It was her last movie.
The Piano.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me
Taking me back down the vista of years
Till I see a child sitting under the piano
In the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother
Who smiles as she sings
In spite of myself
The insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back
Till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour
The tinkling piano our guide
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato
The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance
I weep like a child for the past.
"So, young Master McKellen, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
This is Auntie Dorothy one Christmas.
"Do you want to be a preacher, like your grandad? Yes? Yes?"
"No. No."
"Do you want to be, oh, a teacher, like your Uncle Ken? Yes?"
"No."
"Well, do you want to be a civil engineer, like your dad?"
And I screamed inside, "No, no, no!
"I want to go into hotel management."
[LAUGHTER]
For years, I wanted to be a chef,
and then a journalist,
and then something...
Not an actor. Well, not yet.
Eventually, inevitably.
I suppose it all began when I was very young.
One Wednesday morning.
I was taken out of my nursery school in Wigan.
I was three. Three years old.
And we were going on our first family theatre outing to Manchester ― big city.
On the train.
The steam train.
And we were going to go to the Palace Theatre.
What a wonderful name for a theatre.
And we were all going to see Peter Pan. And all through the journey,
"Mummy, will it be a real crocodile?
"Mummy, will they really fly?"
"Well, we'll have to wait and see."
Well, the trouble was I could see. I mean, I could see the wires.
And the croc...
It was obviously just a silly man crawling about on his tummy.
I don't know ― three years old and a critic.
Tinkerbell ― it was obviously just a torch!
Mind you, when Peter Pan said we were to clap
if we believed in fairies,
I clapped away.
I've been clapping ever since.
[APPLAUSE]
And that's one of those moments. You don't see it coming and it changes your life.
Dad whispered, "We've got to go!"
Before the end of the show.
Get the train back to Wigan. And we're pushing along the row
where we've been sitting up there, getting to the side door to go.
And just before, I have one last look at the stage.
And the backcloth is covered in little stars.
In Neverland.
And I thought...
"I want more of this. I'm coming back."
And it wasn't that I wanted to be on the stage.
No, I wanted to be behind it, either side of it, underneath it.
Is that possible?
Above it. Find out where did all the wires go to?
How does it all work? What's behind the scenery?
And anyway...
How do you make starlight?
So this...
..passion grew.
And it wasn't a passion for the church.
It wasn't a passion for music. I still can't play the piano.
It wasn't a passion for cricket.
It could have been, because at the end of our garden was the Wigan Cricket Club,
and every Saturday during the season,
I saw every single game,
and on Sundays, I used to race back from Sunday School to score for the Second XI.
Look what I've just found at home.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Awww!
It's my studio chair.
They gave it to me on the last day of Priest of Love.
Not what I was looking for.
Here we are.
"Country Borough of Wigan Education Committee exercise book.
"Name ― Ian M McKellen."
M is for Murray.
"Subject ― hobbies book."
(CHUCKLES) I wonder, can you see?
"The theatre.
"Yes, anything to do with the theatre pleases me.
"I'm sure a great thrill must go through
"anyone sitting in the orchestra stalls and waiting for the curtain to go up.
"But have you ever thought of all the work
"that many people have to undergo...?"
Who did I think I was writing it for?
Well, perhaps for you.
Here's my theatre diary.
"One week ago, I saw Mr Novello's King's Rhapsody
"at the Palace Theatre, Manchester."
Ah, so we did go back there. Now, that needs a bit of an explanation these days.
King's Rhapsody...
..was the last of the great extravagant sentimental operettas ― musicals...
by Ivor Novello, the Welsh composer and actor,
remembered these days for the Novello Theatre in London and...
oh, everywhere, every year with the Ivor Novello Awards for popular music.
When he was 21 years old,
he had written the hit song of...
the First World War, still remembered today.
Do you recall?
Keep the Home Fires Burning.
♪ Keep the home fires burning... ♪
Though your hearts are yearning.
(AUDIENCE SINGS ALONG) ♪ Though your hearts are yearning... ♪
While the boys are far away.
♪ While the boys are far away... ♪
They dream of home.
♪ They dream of home
AUDIENCE MEMBER: ♪ There's a silver... ♪
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: ♪ Through the dark clouds shining
♪ Turn the dark cloud inside out
♪ Till the boys come home. ♪
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
And then later, in the Second World War, he wrote We'll Gather Lilacs.
He didn't sing himself, but he was always in the musicals
and he accompanied the leading ladies.
In the case of King's Rhapsody,
she was called... Well!
Well, his leading lady in King's Rhapsody had a stage name
and it had been given to her by Ivor Novello.
He said, "I'm going to name you
"after the most beautiful actress working today.
"And I'm going to give you her initials and her second name.
"We'll spell it differently."
And that's how young Vanessa Lee
was named after the beautiful Vivien Leigh.
Oh, and was Ivor beautiful!
Oh, you have a look at his early photographs in his silent movies ―
two of them directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
On stage, total matinee idol.
One year, he'd won an award for the most glamorous profile in the world.
And the hit song in King's Rhapsody was
♪ Someday my heart will awake
♪ Someday... ♪
And up there...
..in row C, where we were sitting for my mother's birthday treat, my heart...
I mean...Ivor Novello...
..upstage centre. Profile on display.
Tailored silken dressing gown.
And at the exact moment
when he seductively handed over a glass of champagne
to young Vanessa Lee on the chaise longue,
up there in row C,
I had my first erection.
[LAUGHTER]
And I've loved the theatre ever since.
[APPLAUSE]
I mean, loved it as you love it, as theatregoers.
And it was sister Jean started taking me to the theatre.
When I was ten,
she took me off to the Wigan Little Theatre
to see the amateurs there do Twelfth Night.
First Shakespeare I'd ever seen.
And shortly after, at the same address, Macbeth.
And my boyhood seemed to be packed with Shakespeare.
Our school took an annual camp to Stratford-upon-Avon,
where Shakespeare was born.
Under canvas, and then we punted up the River Avon
to the old Memorial Theatre,
where some of the most illustrious performers of my youth
were in the summer season of Shakespeare there.
Most exciting of all for me,
Sir Laurence Olivier.
And I saw him first playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night.
Second time I'd seen the play.
And in the same season, Macbeth.
And his wife in the play was played by his actual wife,
the beautiful Vivien Leigh.
Then I started going to the theatre...
..by myself. I hesitate because...
Well, it's true of everything, but...
My relationship with the live theatre has been very dependent on luck. Good luck.
And...the luck was that Dad got a new job
and we moved from Wigan all of 11 miles away to Bolton.
And 150,000 people in the cotton spinning town,
and in Bolton, they had three fully functioning commercial theatres,
and I went to them all.
Number one, the Hippodrome.
This housed the Lawrence Williamson Players
and they did weekly rep ― a weekly repertory of a new play every Monday.
Thriller, light comedy, farce.
And that would play through the week in the evenings,
while during the day, the actors rehearsed the following week's play.
They'd been doing this without a break for 27 years,
and some of the actors had been in the company that length of time.
And they obviously didn't get paid enough money
and they certainly didn't get enough rehearsal.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm afraid it was 27 years of rather dodgy productions.
But I did not care.
Then in Churchgate in Bolton...
..we had the Theatre Royal.
Now, this was something. It had been designed
by the great late-19th-century architect of British theatres,
Frank Matcham.
Some of them still remain up and down the place.
I've played them on this tour ― Theatre Royal, Newcastle
and the Lyric Hammersmith, and there are others in London ―
the Palladium, the Coliseum, the Victoria Palace.
But in Bolton, the Theatre Royal.
And this put on tours ― Ballet Rambert.
Carl Rosa Opera, Gilbert and Sullivan...
Oh, and at Christmas, the pantomime.
I love pantomime.
I see a pantomime every year.
Well, many more than one if I can manage it.
What an introduction to the theatre pantomime is,
because anything that's theatrical works in a pantomime, doesn't it,
from transforming scenery
to outrageous costumes and singing and dancing and poetry.
A moral story.
Silly jokes, dirty jokes, audience participation.
It invented here. It belongs to us. It's ours.
Doesn't travel very well.
Well, I mean you try explaining to somebody what a pantomime is.
Ah, well, you see, there's all this cross-dressing.
And the principal boy isn't actually a boy.
No, she's a girl. And the dame is not really a dame.
He's a bloke in a frock.
Oh, it's nothing to do with female impersonation.
And when I came to achieve a lifetime's ambition of playing there myself,
it was here in London at The Old Vic theatre
and we were doing Aladdin. I was playing his mother, Widow Twankey,
and Sean, who was directing, had assembled
a world-beating troupe of talent onstage and off.
I thought, I'm really going to have to find out how to do this.
So I found a man who had played dames professionally 40 times ―
the Welsh prince of laughter, Wyn Calvin,
and he said, "Well, I'm only too happy to help, Ian.
"Now, look, if you're going to play dames,
"there are two things that are very important to remember.
"Number one...
"..warm your bra on the radiator."
[LAUGHTER]
"And two ― get your first entrance right. I'll tell you what I do.
"I'm running a laundry, as you know, in old Peking.
"And I just dashed out to do a little bit of shopping on my own down the market.
"Looking for bargains. And I'm on my way back home.
"Of course I've got my shopping bag with me,
"and I make my entrance from the prompt corner.
"And of course the audience sees me immediately,
"but I pretend that I don't see them.
"I pay them no heed.
"And I get to the centre of the stage then I have a little stop in the middle.
"Then I go back the way I came.
"I still don't see them.
"And then I wait until I get to the middle of the stage,
"then I give a little trip,
"and I look down and then I look up.
"And then I see them."
Hello, boys and girls!
― Hello! It's Twankey! ― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello!
Hello, darling!
Look here. Twankey ― that's my name.
Well, yes, I've heard all the jokes, thank you very much.
Anyway, it's Mrs Twankey to you.
Well, no, actually, it's not, it's Widow Twankey.
AUDIENCE, HALF-HEARTEDLY: Awww!
Well, come on!
AUDIENCE, ENTHUSIASTICALLY: Awww!
All right, don't go mad.
You never met my horrible ex-husband,
Donald J Twankey.
[APPLAUSE]
You know the kind, girls ― all hair and no wall.
Oh, would you shut up, you politico!
Got people trying to sleep down here.
Oh, I love your hair, madam.
Did you come on a motorbike?
Hello, love. Give us a little wave. Go on.
Yeah. That's right. All the boys and girls, all the mums and dads,
wave to Twankey. Thank you.
And you lot up there.
♪ The boy I love is up in the gallery... ♪
Don't lean over, dear.
Don't want any accidents. If you give me a little wave,
I'll give you a little sweetie.
All right, go on.
Here you go. (LAUGHS)
Wooo!
All right, one for you.
One for you.
And one for you.
Go on!
(CHUCKLES)
[CHEERING]
Oh dear!
All right!
Oh dear!
No, it's always nice, isn't it,
to have something to suck?
Go on, darling, there you are!
AUDIENCE: Woo!
Anyone fancy a banana?
Go on, you little monkey!
We'll have another go. Come on.
[AUDIENCE GASPS]
All right.
[LAUGHTER]
(MOUTHS)
Go on. Go on.
Come on. Come and get it.
[CHEERING]
And do be careful.
Is there an older gentleman who'd like a carrot?
Go on ― you stick that up your Brexit.
I've got to be on my way.
I'm expecting the repairman ― he's coming round to service my Hotpoint.
All this chatting to you and I've got just a little behind.
[CHEERING AND WHISTLING]
All right. So in Churchgate, we've got the Theatre Royal
then there's a little alleyway.
Little alleyway here and then there's another theatre.
Right next door. Also built by Frank Matcham. We had two.
The Grand Theatre. My favourite.
My favourite.
The Grand put on variety. Do you remember?
Variety? Every Monday new performers would arrive in town
and play twice nightly through the week.
Some of them quite famous. I'd heard them on the radio.
And in the Grand, you got performers
you couldn't get on the radio, like dancers.
Like acrobats and magicians.
Escapologists. I remember Alan Alan, The Man They Cannot Hang.
And luck.
The Grand was managed by...
..James Bleakley. Alderman James Bleakley.
Very big in Bolton. He had been the mayor.
Alderman James Bleakley.
Tory, but nice.
And as luck would have it, he works on occasion in the town hall.
And so did my dad, and they got talking and Alderman Bleakley said,
"Oh, yes, that will be all right if young Ian
"wants to come down to the Grand one evening,
"see how it all works.
"Maybe go backstage. Yeah.
"Well, not on a Monday. Let the turns get settled in.
"Say Tuesday? Before first house.
"Six o'clock. Tell him to go down to Churchgate, down the little alleyway,
"knock on t'stage door, say that I sent him."
And so...
Hello. It's Ian McKellen.
McKellen.
Alderman Bleakley said that... Oh, thank you.
"Go on, lad. Go down the stairs.
"Watch yourself ― they're a bit slippy.
"When you get to the bottom, you'll be on the stage."
Oh.
I can see the wires.
The hempen ropes going up, up from the wings to the flies,
and they supported the cloths that went up and down between the performers
on the brightly lit stage here.
Here in the wings, we're in the dark.
It's a bit murky, bit musty, dusty, dirty.
Bare boards.
Nail sticking up, heads of old screws.
And in the corner, Alf ― he's the stage manager.
He gives the cues for the performers to go on stage.
And that's where I have to be, next to him.
Oh, they start coming down from their dressing rooms.
And, oh...
Dreadful dressing rooms ― cracked basins, broken mirrors. Hi-ho.
The glamorous life.
And, oh, they look marvellous, all done up for the stage in their feathers
and their hats and sequins and glitter.
All got this strange orange makeup.
Which always seemed to end just about there.
And they're bickering. I can hear them arguing, complaining.
What, is it the new digs?
Imagine new digs every Monday, every week, every month.
Not a good atmosphere backstage.
And then their music starts up in the orchestra pit.
Joe Hill's Band.
And Alf gets ready.
And gives the cue,
and onto the stage they go.
Transformed.
By the glare of the lights and your attention,
and this reality in the wings...
..put to one side, forgotten for, what, just...seven minutes.
And a whole new reality created...
And I felt at home...
..with them. Because a theatre is a house, isn't it?
Playhouse, opera house. Main house, full house.
And I did not want to go home.
Here I am, backstage for the first time,
wondering what it would actually feel like to be on stage myself.
And that's why I started acting.
Initially at school, Bolton School for Boys.
Lots of theatre going on there.
We had our own miniature theatre.
50 family and friends could fit in to see us do our programme
of one-act plays every term, all the time I was at school.
And then I graduated to the main event ―
the annual school play in the Great Hall.
That ran for six performances through the week.
Classics one year.
Shakespeare, Henry V.
I played King Henry.
And in front of us were these 1,100 chairs.
Always rush bottoms that squeaked and creaked and...
Our first job as young actors was (PROJECTING) to pitch our voices...
over the sound of the chairs...
And I realised that acting,
acting is something that you have to learn, but that you can learn it.
And more than anything else in my young life...
..I wanted to learn how to act because I was going to become an actor.
Not a professional. No, I'm going to be an amateur.
Amateur, like my sister Jean and...
Like the masters at school, when they'd finished with us
would go off to do their amateur productions at the Bolton Little Theatre.
And when it came to leave school...
..I was persuaded to try and follow Uncle Ken to his university.
So I took the entrance exams for Cambridge
and I don't know by what lucky fluke
I got in, and now there's just one obstacle left
between me and three years at Cambridge University
studying English literature.
And so I went up to meet the man who would inadvertently settle my fate ―
Tom Henn at St Catharine's College in Cambridge.
Tom Henn was from County Sligo.
And...
he'd written books on WB Yeats and William Shakespeare.
Had a very distinctive limp.
He had been Brigadier Tom Henn during the war.
I assumed this was a result of some distinguished war wound.
It turned out later
he'd fallen down his staircase drunk one night.
And I was sent up to his rooms in C Staircase at St Catharine's,
put down there on the padded stool.
(IRISH ACCENT) "Well, now, good afternoon to you, Mr...
"McKellen... McKellen?
"Well, now, that would be an Antrim name.
"Well, Mr McKellen,
"it says here that you are...an actor.
"Where have you acted?
"At school?
"Have you acted in any Shakespeare?
"Henry V?
"All right. Do me your speech."
I'm not really thinking about it.
I just jumped up onto the stool as if I was still in the Great Hall.
And I let Tom Henn have it.
(BELLOWING) Once more unto the breach!
Cry God for Harry, England and St George!
And he gave me a scholarship.
[APPLAUSE]
One of my worst performances.
And most successful auditions.
Now I'd arrived at my drama school ―
not that Cambridge had a drama faculty then ―
but it was full of people my age as crazy about the theatre as I was.
Some of them, like young Derek Jacobi and Clive Swift,
they were going to become professionals after graduation.
So was Miriam Margolyes, Peter Cook, David Frost and Trevor Nunn.
Not me. No, no, I'm still going to be an amateur.
And so three years of bliss, really. 21 undergraduate productions.
And then what?
I thought, what job can I possibly get
which will allow me to go on acting at the rate at which I've been acting...
..at Cambridge?
Unless of course I actually become a professional.
I thought, who's going to take me seriously as a professional actor?
Then I thought, well, if Derek Jacobi can do it...
Sounds like a line out of Vicious.
No, Derek was streets ahead of me at Cambridge.
He's one of those people who just seems to leap out of the cradle
fully formed as an actor.
And off he went to the prestigious Birmingham Rep.
And where was I gonna go?
Well, I couldn't go to Bolton.
They'd pulled down the Hippodrome and they pulled down the Theatre Royal.
And one dreadful afternoon during the long vacation,
I went to have a look at the Grand.
And the roof was off and I could see the benches...
..in the gods open to the sky until they too were chucked out.
And luck.
This theatre was beginning to change...
..at that time, and change for the better.
The old weekly, commercial weekly reps,
they were on their way out.
They were being replaced by theatres that were subsidised
with the little bit of public money from local authorities
or the Central Arts Council of Great Britain.
And in the Midlands, after the devastation of the war bombing...
..in Coventry, they'd just built their own theatre,
the first civic theatre ever built in the country.
They called it the Belgrade Theatre. And there they did fortnightly rep.
Which meant they had two weeks rehearsal, which meant...
..which meant they were bound to be twice as good.
And I applied and I was accepted.
And so started my apprenticeship as a professional actor.
I have to confess...
..that having just enjoyed sex for the first time at Cambridge,
I wanted to go to the British theatre
because I'd heard that it was possible to meet other queers there.
And it is.
[LAUGHTER]
And so I signed up for a year at the Belgrade in Coventry.
Eight pounds ten shillings a week ― three guineas of that covered the cost of digs.
And the contract said "play as cast",
which means you have to do any part that you're given, and that suited me.
Here's the first play than I did professionally.
Of course it was a revival of Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons.
I played Roper, the son-in-law of the main character.
Then we did Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.
I was cast as Claudio, which is a dreadful part.
Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant,
You Never Can Tell. I played one of the twins.
Anton Chekhov, The Seagull.
Toad of Toad Hall. Chief weasel.
Yes, Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers. Mr Snodgrass.
There were 17 of these plays, two of them...
had been written especially for us ― they were world premieres.
That's the last play that we did ― Andre Obey, Noah.
Oh, and that one.
The Bride Comes Back.
By Ronald Millar. It says here on the cover,
rather optimistically, "a comedy".
After he'd finished writing plays,
Ronald Millar started to write political speeches,
and he invented for Mrs Thatcher that famous quip,
"The lady's not for turning".
I wish there'd been a few jokes as good as that in the play.
And then of course we had to do an Agatha Christie.
And...yeah, here it is.
Which play by Agatha Christie is that?
[SCATTERED COMMENTS FROM AUDIENCE]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Black...
Black Coffee, did you say?
[LAUGHTER]
Did you say Black Coffee? Yes.
Have you ever seen it?
No?
Well, I've been in it.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, let me tell you about Black Coffee.
At the end of Act I of the play,
the master of the household comes down from supper,
and he's sitting there surrounded by potential murderers and victims.
And I'm 22 years old, playing the ancient retainer,
who has to carry the fatal cup of black coffee over to him.
And I decide that my man's going to be old.
No, no, no, really, really old... like, 80.
[LAUGHTER]
I put a pale Leichner base on and squeezed the end of my greasepaints
to get a lake, and put lines and wrinkles, brown shading,
half a pound of self-raising flour on my head.
And across the stage I go, walking like 80-year-olds always do.
Look, I was doing this sort of thing long before Julie Walters.
And then the master of the household...
..has the deathless line...
"This coffee is very bitter."
Gus is the cat from the theatre door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
is really Aspara-gus, but that's such a fuss to pronounce
that they usually call him just Gus.
His coat's very shabby.
He's thin as a rake. He suffers from palsy...
..which makes his paw shake.
Yet he was in his youth quite the smartest of cats,
though no longer a terror to mice or rats,
for he isn't the cat that he was in his prime.
Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time.
And whenever he joins his friends at their club,
which takes place at the back of a neighbouring pub,
he loves to regale them, if someone else pays,
♪ With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest of days
♪ For he once was a star
♪ Of the highest degree
♪ He has acted with Irving
♪ He has acted with Tree♪
And he loves to recall his success on the Halls,
when the gallery once gave him seven calls.
But his grandest creation
As he loves to tell
Was Firefrorefiddle
The Fiend of the Fell.
He has played, so he says, every possible part
and I used to know 70 speeches by heart.
I'd extemporise backchat.
Meow! Me-ooow!
I knew how to gag.
And I knew how to let the cat out of the bag.
I have sat by the bedside of poor Little Nell
When the curfew was rung, then I swung on the bell.
In the pantomime season I never fell flat,
And I once understudied
Dick Whittington's Cat.
But my grandest creation, as he loves to tell
Was Firefrorefiddle...
The Fiend of the Fell.
Then if someone will give him a toothful of gin
He will tell how he once played a part in East Lynne
In a Shakespeare performance he once came on pat
When some actor suggested the need for a cat
And he says, now these kittens, they do not get trained
As we did in the days when Victoria reigned
They do not get drilled in a regular troupe
And they think it is smart just to jump through a hoop
And he says, as he scratches himself with his claws
Well, the theatre is certainly not what it was.
These modern productions are all very well
But nothing can equal, from what I hear tell
That moment of mystery
When I made history
As Firefrorefiddle
♪ The Fiend of the Fell. ♪
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much!
Words by TS Eliot,
and a little bit of the music by AL Webber.
And in the film,
Cats The Musical, I got to play Gus.
And do you remember who was Old Deuteronomy?
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Judi Dench. ― Yes, young Judi Dench.
Oh, I loved seeing her all curled up in her cat basket.
Judi and I have worked together on many happy occasions.
Never more so than when we've been in the company together,
because like me, she started off in rep.
And after the Belgrade in Coventry, I moved a little bit further north
to the New Playhouse in Nottingham.
And we opened it up. Another new civic theatre.
Oh, and the excitement of the first night. There were flowers and...
..and telegrams. One of them in particular
was stuck up on the noticeboard in the green room for the actors.
It's a telegram from London from the National Theatre of Great Britain,
and it was signed, Laurence Olivier.
I wish I'd stolen it.
Olivier was running his new National Theatre,
not in specially built premises like we had in Coventry and Nottingham.
No, he was in the old Old Vic.
But his planning was based on the experience of the regional reps.
He kept together a company of actors,
oh, for months, years, doing a changing repertoire of plays.
And in the company from the word go was young Maggie Smith.
And here's a bit of luck. Maggie came to see her friend,
the English film star Phyllis Calvert, in a new play
at the Duke of York's Theatre here in London,
and I was in the cast.
It was the first play I'd ever done as a professional in London.
And Maggie went back to Sir Laurence...
..and...
..I got the call ― would I come and join the National Theatre?
Because Sir Laurence was putting together a new production of Much Ado About Nothing
and he invited me to come and play the part of Claudio.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, of course, I was not going to say to no.
No, Much Ado was to be directed by the...
..wonderful opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli.
And Maggie was to be Beatrice
and her then husband, Robert Stephens, Benedick.
And I had joined the most prestigious rep company in the country,
if not the world.
Oh, there was just one thing.
Listen to who else was in that company at the same time.
Now, look, these are just actors of my gender and my generation.
Robert Stephens. Derek Jacobi, fresh from Birmingham.
Anthony Hopkins, Michael Gambon,
Jeremy Brett,
Colin Blakey, Edward Petherbridge, Edward Hardwicke, Ronald Pickup,
Michael Burke, Michael York, Frank Finlay.
And the most famous and glamorous young acts of the time,
Albert Finney.
We were all...
..in the company at the same time.
And you know, today the National Theatre of Great Britain
doesn't have an acting company.
Nor does any other theatre in the country.
With one exception, and we went to visit them on the tour in Scotland.
There we are ― Dundee Rep.
The one theatre in the country that still has the old system.
And I thought, if I'm going to have to stand in line
behind that queue of talent,
I'm never going to get anywhere at the National Theatre, so...
I handed in my notice after only nine months.
And Sir Laurence was not best pleased.
You know he had a rather flowery turn of phrase.
And he said, "I am haunted...
"..by the spectre of lost opportunity."
Well, he needn't have worried too much.
I fell in with a touring troupe of players, Prospect,
who did the classics, mainly, around the country and...
..they were doing a play by Christopher Marlowe,
an exact contemporary of Shakespeare's.
And his play, King Edward II,
which I think is the first play ever in the English language
to have a gay hero at the centre, and they asked me to play King Edward.
And all was well and off we went.
Until we reach the Edinburgh International Festival,
where we found ourselves doing the first gay play ever written
on the temporary stage of the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland.
And, uh...
To the first night came a local councillor, Councillor John Kidd,
and he was (SCOTTISH ACCENT) appalled at the sight of two actors ―
that would be Jimmy Laurenson and me ―
kissing!
He complained to the local Watch Committee.
He was determined he was going to close down our production.
And so they sent to the second performance,
to judge whether we would be allowed to continue or not,
two policemen,
who sat on the front row in full uniform.
And...they seemed to enjoy it.
And...they stayed right through to the end and they started the standing ovation.
And that was the last that we heard of that.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
Mind you, because of all the fuss he'd caused,
we sold every single ticket.
John Kidd.
(SIGHS)
A man of his time, of course.
And the time was 1969,
when it was still illegal for two men to make love in Scotland.
And my boyfriend Brian and I broke the law most nights.
Brian was a history teacher at a secondary modern school
here in London, in Shepherd's Bush, and we lived close by. We had...
..gay friends and straight friends. We always went out together as a couple,
but of course, we'd never show
any affection towards each other in public. That would have been dangerous.
Had anyone discovered that Brian was gay, he could have been sacked as a teacher.
Not me ― I'm fine as an actor ― but I'm so busy enjoying myself,
I don't really notice that the law is discriminating against me.
And I don't speak publicly about being gay.
I'm what the Americans would call...I was in the closet.
And the closet is not a glamorous place to be.
We would say I was living in a cupboard,
and you cannot live in a cupboard, unless of course, you're a skeleton.
And this went on.
Even when I was doing a world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre.
Martin Sherman's sensational Bent,
which educated the world on the ill-treatment of gay people...
..in the labour camps of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler.
I remember saying to a journalist at the time, "Oh, Bent...
"It's not a play about gay rights. No, it's a play about human rights."
As if there were a difference.
I couldn't quite bring myself to be honest.
And then I woke up.
The government was introducing a nasty, short brutish law
called Section 28.
If you don't know what that is, Google it. You won't believe it.
Section 28...
..would make it illegal for any teacher in a state-maintained school
to say anything positive about homosexuality in the classroom.
Keep the kids in the dark.
Lie if necessary.
Do not prepare them for the world outside.
And I took this personally.
And did I get angry. I went on the marches and I...
..signed petitions, wrote letters, banged on doors.
And I debated the issue on radio
with a man who thought Section 28 was a jolly good idea.
He was the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Peregrine Worsthorne.
And...
..he said to me in the course of our discussion,
"Do you know, McKellen, these queers,
"they congregate in the West End of London.
"In their own private clubs."
And I said, "Oh, do you mean like the Garrick Club?"
Which is an ultra-respectable gentlemen's club
that I knew Peregrine Worsthorne was a member of.
I said, "Look, we can stop talking about "them".
"You're talking about me. I'm gay."
And that was it.
I was out.
And the weight...
..that fell...
I hadn't known it was there.
And like everybody else who comes out,
I joined the human race.
And this broadcast was going to go out just two days later.
Which meant that I'd just got two days to nip up to the Lake District
to have a long a...long overdue chat with my 80-year-old stepmother Gladys.
Gladys was five feet one inches tall.
She was from Birkenhead. She'd done her early theatre-going in Liverpool
at the Royal Court and the Playhouse.
So we had that in common. And we both liked dogs.
She was a Quaker. Good woman.
And the day... Oh, it was just...
..blue...blue.
And I drove Gladys out to my favourite spot, the Langdale Pikes.
Stopped the car, wound down the windows.
And we could hear the birds tweeting and the Herdwick sheep bleating.
"Look, Gladys, there's something that I want to...
"that I ought to have... that I've always been meaning to...
"You know I've just been to San Francisco?
"Yeah, well...
"I met there Armistead Maupin. You know, the man who wrote
"Tales of the City that you like so much.
"Well, it turns out Armistead Maupin lives with his partner,
"who is a man. Turns out that Armistead Maupin is actually gay.
"And..."
And I'm...
..stammering and sweating. I'm 47 years old
and I can't tell the woman I love most in the world.
And eventually I just blurt it out.
"Gladys, I'm trying to tell you I'm gay."
And she said, "Oh, Ian!
"I thought you were going to tell me something really dreadful.
"I've known that for 35 years."
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Well, you know, 35 wasted years, but except from that moment,
Gladys and Ian...
..best pals. And, wasn't I lucky, she went on for another 20 years.
She was over 100, and I got to take her to Buckingham Palace.
Have you ever been?
[LAUGHTER]
No? Oh, well, once inside Buckingham Palace,
you'll find that everything is designed to, if not intimidate, to impress.
And to my big day, I took Gladys and my sister.
And they were shunted off somewhere quite early on,
I suppose to await my arrival in the Throne Room.
And I was left facing...
..the ceremonial staircase that overlooks the courtyard there in the Palace,
and at the end of each step, each tread,
there was a young soldier with a silver breastplate and white leather trousers.
[LAUGHTER]
(GROANS)
And we were shown into this long room.
It was oblong. It was more like a gallery.
An art gallery, really. There were Titians on the wall.
Van Dijks, Reynoldses.
And at the centre of the hall,
there was a great crowd of very distinguished-looking ladies and gentlemen
who'd travelled across the world to meet the Queen and get their medal.
All done up in their Sunday best. And at this end of the hall, same thing ―
another crowd of people. And in between, there was just enough room...
I think he was the Lord Chamberlain. ..to slip through
and try and put us all at our ease.
"So now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Buckingham Palace.
"I'm sure some of you are a little bit apprehensive about today's proceedings.
"But let me reassure you, absolutely nothing can go wrong.
"Because we here at Buckingham Palace
"have done this sort of thing many, many times before.
"However, there's one thing I do want you to remember,
"because it's absolutely vitally important.
"At the moment at which you greet Her Majesty..."
(INDISTINCT SPEECH)
[LAUGHTER]
"So if we can all remember that."
Panic!
And then we were led in single file along the corridors
lined with Ming vases, more classical painters...
In the distance, I can hear...
I suppose it's the Coldstream Guards playing the National Anthem.
That must mean she's arrived in the Throne Room.
And then through the archway we go, and then, oh, my God!
Oh, here we are. Oh, look. Oh, my goodness.
Oh, look, that's where I'm going to have to kneel.
Oh, there she is.
In lime green.
[LAUGHTER]
And I stood to one side, waiting for my name to be called.
Do you know who was standing next to me waiting for his knighthood?
Peregrine Worsthorne.
It's called balance.
And then I heard...
"Mr Yawn McKellen..."
And I'm so impressed by the whole proceedings,
particularly being face-to-face with the Queen, I thought to myself,
good God, I've been mispronouncing my own name all these years.
All right.
To end this half, a poem about getting old.
Written I think by my favourite poet.
He happens to be gay. He was a Jesuit priest and teacher.
And he slapped the words on the page like oils on the canvas
so they all mixed up together in an almost incomprehensible way.
Bit like looking at a Van Gogh painting up close.
Gerard Manley Hopkins.
And, like his hero Shakespeare,
he wanted to write a play, and he started one, which he couldn't finish.
And in the play, there's a chorus who speak The Leaden Echo.
In which they bemoan the fact that they're getting older and they don't like it.
And...
Then the whole thing spins on a pun.
And we get the response from The Golden Echo.
In which it says, look, if you want to hold on to your youth and your beauty,
you best give them away.
And Hopkins wrote, "Take breath and read it with ears.
"As I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right."
I hope you agree.
How to keep...
Is there any
Any
Is there nowhere known, some bow or brooch
Or braid or brace
Lace, latch or catch or key
To keep back beauty
Keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty
From vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles Rankéd wrinkles deep down?
No waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers,
Sad and stealing messengers of grey?
O there's none, no, no, there's none Nor can you long be
What you now are, called fair
Do what you may do, what
Do what you may
And wisdom is early to despair
So be beginning, since now nothing can be done to keep at bay age.
And age's evils, hoar hair
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying
Death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms
And tumbling to decay
So be beginning to despair
O there's none; no, no, no, there's none
Be beginning to despair
To despair
Despair, despair, despair, despair
Spare!
There is one
Yes, I have one
Hush there!
Only not within seeing of the sun
Not within the singeing of the strong sun
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air
Somewhere, elsewhere there is Ah well where!
One
Yes, I can tell such a key
I do know such a place
Where whatever's prized and passes of us
Everything that's fresh and fast flying of us
Seems to us sweet of us
And swiftly away with, done away with, undone
Sone with, soon done with
And yet dearly and dangerously sweet of us
The wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty
Too, too apt to, ah! to fleet
Never fleets more
Fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being To its loveliness of youth
It is an ever-lastingness of O it is
An all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks
Locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace
Winning ways, airs innocent, sweet looks, loose locks
Long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace
Resign them
Sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver them
Early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back
To God
Beauty's self
And beauty's giver
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash
Not the least lash lost
Every hair is, hair of the head, numbered
O weary then why should we tread?
O why are we so haggard at the heart
So care-coiled, care-killed
So fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it
Kept, ah, with fonder a care
And we, we should have lost it
Finer, fonder a care kept.
Where kept?
Do but tell us where kept?
Yonder
What high as that?
We follow, we follow
Yonder, yes yonder
Yonder, yonder, yonder.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely....
AUDIENCE Players.
They have their exits and their entrances.
And one man
in his time plays many parts,
his acts being seven ages.
First the infant...
..mewling...
..and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining schoolboy
with his satchel and shining morning face,
creeping like snail unwillingly to school.
Then the lover, sighing like furnace,
with a woeful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow.
Then, the soldier, full of strange oaths...
..and bearded like the pard,
jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth.
Then the justice,
in fair round belly with a good capon lined,
with eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
full of wise saws and modern instances.
And so he plays his part.
The sixth age shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
with spectacles on nose and pouch on side.
His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide...
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
turning again toward childish treble,
pipes and whistles in his sound.
Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history,
is second childishness...
..and mere oblivion, sans eyes,
sans teeth...
..sans taste...
..sans everything.
The melancholy words of Jaques from Act II, Scene vii of As You Like It,
a play by William Shakespeare which I've never been in.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
I've got into the habit of going to the stage door during the interval
to get a bit of fresh air, and I was doing that in East Anglia,
when we were at the Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich,
and I'm just standing there and the girl...
I think she was delivering pizzas or something.
And she caught sight of me and said,
"Oh, I know you.
"You're from Harry Potter!"
I said, "I'm sorry, love, you've got the wrong wizard. I pay the real wizard."
Of course she thought she'd seen Michael Gambon.
I did once ask Mike if he ever got mistaken for me.
"Oh, yes," he said,
"the whole time, they bring me
"their wretched eight-by-ten photographs of Gandalf."
I said, "What do you do?"
He said, "Oh, I just sign your name."
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I just hope he spells it correctly.
So there we are. That's As You Like It.
That's one of 37 plays which Shakespeare wrote. And guess what? In here...
I've got the other 36.
So...
There we are. Those are the...
..the Roman plays ― plays that are set in Italy.
I think there's one of them set in Greece as well.
Then we've got the four last plays that he wrote ― the late plays.
The two so-called "problem plays".
Look at all those tragedies.
No, no, comedies, rather, he wrote.
These are the tragedies ― just five of those.
All right.
All the rest, they're all plays set in the past ― history plays.
All right.
So...
Here's a challenge. Do you suppose collectively
you can remember all the titles of Shakespeare's plays?
Yes!
Iljama, where are you?
Could you name me a play by Shakespeare?
ILJAMA: Macbeth!
AUDIENCE: Ooh!
[APPLAUSE]
Well done. No, that's a play by Shakespeare,
and a very good one too, and a lucky play for me.
But for a lot of actors, it's thought not to be.
It's a play so unlucky that we won't say the title.
Do you know what I'm referring to?
AUDIENCE: The Scottish Play.
The Scottish play. Thank you.
Yes, that's what we call it.
And we will not mention the title backstage or quote it.
Oh, all hell breaks loose.
Why is it...
..so unlucky? Well, it's nothing to do with the supernatural, I think.
It's because ― could be ―
the play is perhaps the most popular play he wrote with audiences.
It's short.
And...
..it's a thriller, and whenever you put The Scottish Play on,
an audience always turns up to see it.
So that may be the origin
why professional actors will not even say the title,
because in the old days, when the actors were touring around
with a bundle of Shakespeare in their repertoire
and they heard that the management were thinking of slipping in
a couple of extra performances of this play, ever popular,
it probably meant that there wasn't enough money in the kitty
to pay the actors at the end of the week.
So don't even mention the title.
Maybe.
And...
You'll like this. When we were in...
..North Wales ― Mold, Theatr Clwyd ―
in the audience was Royd Tolkien...
..the great-grandson.
And afterwards, he...
..said, "Ian, this was my great-grandad's copy of Macbeth.
"I'd like you to have it."
There we are.
So...
OK, up there in the balcony, a play by Shakespeare?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Cymbeline.
Cymbeline, OK.
Well, we all know Cymbeline.
[LAUGHTER]
You wait. You know it better than you realise.
In the play, you know, the two brothers...
..discover their best friend has died and they weave a quilt of words,
which we often use today.
So, now for Gladys and my parents and sister Jean...
..and recently for good friends Tim Pigott-Smith, John Hurt,
Alan Rickman, Stan Lee,
who wrote X-Men, Gillian Lynne... who choreographed the original Cats...
..Peter Hall, Clive Swift...
..Freddie Jones, Stephen Moore...
..Frank Finlay, and now, Albert Finney...
Fear no more the heat of the sun.
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
And all lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!
[APPLAUSE]
"Like chimney sweepers come to dust."
You know, the dandelion, when it loses his yellow petals,
it turn into a sort of puffball. It looks a bit like
the old brushes that went up the old chimneys,
which is why Shakespeare and his contemporaries
called the dandelion
"the chimney sweeper."
(BLOWS)
Come to...
..dust.
OK. Play by Shakespeare?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: As You Like It.
As You Like It. Well, we've had that one.
Play by Shakespeare?
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Richard III. ― Richard III. OK.
Bloody good film.
[LAUGHTER]
This is my street screenplay. The only book I intend to write,
apart from the brochure, which is still available at the...
And what I did was I put the...
..the dialogue as I cut it down from the play
on this side and on the other, photographs of...
There's Nigel Hawthorne.
Robert Downey Jr.
And then there's Maggie Smith enjoying a Coca-Cola.
Oh, and up there, if you want to have a look at this,
you can get it ― it's free on my website.
What's the first word in this play? Not the first line, the first word.
AUDIENCE Now.
Now, what a word to start to play with.
Now what's going to happen?
Now where are we?
That's live theatre.
It's here and it's...
And it's us, you know,
it's not yesterday's performance, it's not tomorrow's, it's not the movie.
Film is a bit...
a bit "then", isn't it?
Because the actors aren't there. It's just...
Shadows on a screen.
But here we are...ready for anything.
Ah. Hmm.
OK, play by Shakespeare?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Midsummer Night's Dream. OK.
When we were at Cambridge,
we recorded the whole of Shakespeare on record for...
..the British Council.
And all the main parts were played by professional actors
and we played the other parts.
So in Midsummer Night's Dream, I got to play Lysander.
Which is a marginally better part than Claudio.
And that's another play we did on record ― Antony and Cleopatra.
And Cleopatra was played by Irene Worth.
And I had the very, very, very small part of Mardian the eunuch.
(CHUCKLES)
OK, next one.
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hamlet. ― Hamlet.
Well, Hamlet.
He's one of us, isn't he? Loves the theatre.
When he hears that his father has been murdered,
or so the ghost tells him...
..he fears he's living in a prison.
Who can he talk to, apart from...
you? And then...
..then he discovers that it's his uncle, now the king, who did the murder.
So the ghost tells him again.
He has to talk to the audience. Then the actors arrive in Elsinore.
The players do a bit of a play.
And Hamlet, as we all do, responds to what he sees in the play
to his own life, and then off actors go and the court leaves.
So...
Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction...
..in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have?
He would drown the stage with tears
But I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no...
Not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made.
Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain?
Breaks my pate across?
Tweaks me by the nose?
Gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack the gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, (SHOUTING) lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
O, what an ass am I!
This is most brave...
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab, A scullion!
Fie upon't! About, my brain!
I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before my uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick: if he do blench,
I know my course.
This spirit that I have seen May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.
I have things More relative than this:
The play is the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
So Hamlet goes on to write a couple of extra lines into the actors' play
and he gives it a new title.
He calls it The Mousetrap.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
All right. Back of the stalls, a play?
(PEOPLE CALLING OUT)
All right, I heard King Lear.
Oh, was it the year before last I did King Lear a hundred times?
Not for the first time.
It's that sort of play.
It's like a mountain.
You'll never get to the top.
Although the view from halfway up can be all right. Look.
There's Timothy West. He's played King Lear in four different productions.
And the hero of my youth, John Gielgud, he played King Lear three times.
I saw him do it once at the Opera House in Manchester.
And a colleague a fellow actor
asked Gielgud if he'd got any tips on playing King Lear.
And Gielgud said, "Oh, yes!
"Get a small Cordelia."
[LAUGHTER]
When Gielgud was playing...
Lear at Stratford,
his fool, King Lear's fool, was played by Alan Badel. Wonderful actor.
He's only got one fault.
He always insisted on giving other actors in the production he was in
notes on how they ought to be playing their part.
And I suffered that when I was playing a small part...
..with him in Henry VIII on radio
and poor old Gielgud playing King Lear...
Well, this was told me by a friend who was standing in the wings with Sir John.
"Sir John, Sir John, we're on the wrong side of the stage.
"We shouldn't be here. We should be over there.
"We come out from over there. If we go this way we can get to..."
"Yes, yes, I know, I know.
"But I'm hiding from Alan Badel."
[LAUGHTER]
Oh dear, oh dear!
All right. Up there, yes?
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Measure for Measure. ― Measure for Measure.
Well, that's one of the problem plays.
It is for me. I've never been in it,
but whenever I see it, I never quite get to grips.
So I'm looking forward to the production that explains it all.
And what's the other problem play?
― (AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT ANSWERS) ― No.
― Merchant of Venice. ― No.
― (AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT ANSWERS) ― No.
No. These are all easy ones. This is the difficult one.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: All's Well That Ends Well.
What? All's Well That Ends Well. Yes.
Hasn't that got a wonderful rhythm to it?
Why don't we all say it together? Come on.
ALL: All's Well That Ends Well.
Ah!
I just hope that's true. All right, so next play at the back there.
― What, what? ― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Coriolanus.
Coriolanus. Well, I've done that twice.
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Romeo and Juliet. ― Hang on. We're doing Coriolanus.
When I played Marcius Coriolanus at the National,
my mother was played by Irene Worth.
Second time I'd worked with her, and...
She said in rehearsal, "Ian, don't expect me
"to give the same performance every night.
"I don't do that.
"It's live theatre. It's all about the here and..."
AUDIENCE: Now.
She said, "I like to jazz Shakespeare."
That's what I've tried to do with Shakespeare ever since.
And the other great part...
..is Tullus Aufidius. That was played by Greg Hicks.
And that was the part I played when I first did it in Nottingham,
when John Neville was Marcius. His mother was played by Dorothy Reynolds.
That name mean anything to you? Dorothy Reynolds wrote the words
for Salad Days, which was the longest-running musical
in the history of British theatre before there was Andrew Lloyd Webber.
And Tullus and Marcius...
..great rivals on the battlefield, great warriors, great athletes,
and they're too similar.
They hate each other.
Proud, nationalistic, until...
Marcius is thrown out of his native Rome because of his pride
and he makes his way to the enemy camp, where Tullus is waiting...
..and listening.
O Marcius...
Marcius!
Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart
A root of ancient envy.
If Jupiter should from yond cloud speak divine things,
And say 'Tis true,' I'ld not believe them...
..more than thee, all noble Marcius.
Let me twine Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke
And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour.
Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing!
More dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold.
Why, thou Mars!
I tell thee, We have a power on foot; and I had purpose
Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn,
Or lose mine arm for't: thou hast beat me out
Twelve...several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me;
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat,
And waked half dead with nothing.
Had we no quarrel else to Rome, but that
Thou art thence banish'd, we should muster all
From twelve to seventy, and pouring war Into the bowels of ungrateful Rome,
Like a bold flood o'er-bear. O, come, go in,
Let me commend thee first to those that shall
Say yea to thy desires.
A thousand welcomes!
And more a friend than e'er an enemy;
Yet Martius, that was much.
Your hand.
Most welcome!
And if there's two studs are not slipping off into the wings
to have a bit of how's-your-father...
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Titus Andronicus. ― Titus Andronicus.
Well, you know, it's not done very often. Have you ever seen it?
Yeah. Well, whenever it's done, the critics always get very excited.
"Oh, oh, this director! Oh, oh, the actors!
"Oh, they're marvellous!"
"They've managed to turn this rubbish play into something really quite..."
It's not a rubbish play. It's not a rubbish movie. Did you see the film?
Oh, with Anthony Hopkins. If you think he's frightening
as Hannibal Lecter, you wait till you see him as...
Titus Andronicus. Yeah. OK. OK. Another play?
Twelfth Night. That's my favourite.
Can you have a favourite?
Well...yes. It was the first one... first one I saw.
First one...
..that I was in at school. We did the letter scene.
And I played Malvolio.
I was 13 years old. And this copy of the play has got the famous quote.
"Some are born great.
"Some achieve greatness..."
And I suppose with a reference to modern politics,
"Some have greatness thrust upon them."
― OK, another play? ― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Romeo and Juliet.
Thank you.
Romeo and Juliet. Well, he was young.
Young love. Young verse. Easy to understand.
And listen, you'll hear...the text
is full of light and shade, light and dark,
sunlight, daylight, moonlight, starlight,
lamplight. Colours too. White and black.
The white of new snow.
On a raven's back.
Green of the moon.
The red of lips and cheeks
and blood.
Soft!
What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
Ooh, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
She speaks.
O, speak again, bright angel!
(GIRLISHLY) O Romeo, Romeo!
[LAUGHTER]
Wherefore art thou, Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
'Tis but thy name which is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What is Montague?
It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor...
..any other part Belonging to a man.
O, be some other name!
What's in a name?
That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title.
Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself.
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west, And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night...
..that runaway's eyes may wink and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen.
Come, night; come, Romeo.
Come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo...
..and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars.
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night...
..and pay no worship to the garish sun.
Of course, there were no girls allowed in Shakespeare's original production.
I don't know what sort of lad it was that was first entrusted
with playing Juliet,
then Rosalind and Imogen and Viola and Mistress Quickly and...
..Cleopatra. A breed long gone.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
― AUDIENCE MEMBER: Merchant of Venice. ― Merchant of Venice.
Well, that's a part I still want to play. What's his name?
― Antonio. ― Shylock.
No, Shylock is the moneylender. Antonio is the merchant.
And he's gay.
And the odd thing is, there's another gay Antonio in Shakespeare.
Can you think where he's in love with Sebastian?
― Twelfth Night. ― Twelfth Night, yeah.
"For I do love thee so."
Do you suppose Shakespeare had a mate called Antonio?
♪ Oh, oh, Antonio!
♪ He's gone away
♪ Left me on my ownio. ♪
Antonio's got the first line of the play.
"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad."
Well, we soon find out, don't we?
Well, his boyfriend Bassanio's announced he wants to get married to Portia,
and he's expecting poor old Antonio to pay for the wedding.
The cheek of you young lads!
All right, Merchant of Venice. Thank you. Next one.
― Antony and Cleopatra. ― Antony and Cleopatra.
We've had that one. Yeah.
― Taming of the Shrew. ― Taming of the Shrew?
Yeah, that was the first play I saw at Stratford.
Keith Michell was Petruchio.
And...
Oh, the set for the show!
I've ever seen anything like it.
The stage at Stratford was covered in...stuff.
And at the end, when the curtain fell, as curtains used to do in those days,
what happened was they just came very slowly down
and before it reached the bottom,
you could see the set started to move away silently from the audience
till it vanished in the dark.
It was like being back at Peter Pan.
Taming of the Shrew. Yes. Another one?
― (AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT) ― King John, did I hear? Well...
I've been in King John. I took over from Dickie Pasco.
He didn't want to transfer from Stratford.
So I got to play in London the bastard with that wonderful speech...
..about England. Yep. Next one?
― Julius Caesar. ― Julius Caesar.
Got that one. Here we are. Well, not just Julius Caesar ― it's the lot.
Oxford University Press Complete Works of William Shakespeare. My copy.
"Ian. With every good wish from Granny and Grandpa. Christmas 1952."
AUDIENCE: Awww!
You know when they locked up Nelson Mandela? Was it for 27 years?
On Robben Island, just across the strait from Cape Town in South Africa.
They didn't allow them any books unless they were holy books.
And some wit had the idea
of disguising the Oxford University Press Complete Works of William Shakespeare
as a Bible.
And they successfully smuggled it onto Robben Island
and it went around from cell to cell and each inmate signed it.
And against the signature of Nelson Mandela,
he'd underlined...
..a couplet from Julius Caesar ―
"Cowards die many times before their death.
"The valiant never taste of death but once."
The Robben Island Bible.
OK, next one?
― Merry Wives. ― Merry Wives of Windsor.
Well...
Shakespeare's full of quotations, and the quote from this one is...
"The world is my oyster". It comes from this play.
And it's an unusual play, because it's about ordinary people,
and Shakespeare is normally writing about
the nobs, isn't he, kings and queens and heirs to the throne.
Here, it's perfectly ordinary people going about their merry way
in perfectly ordinary Windsor.
[LAUGHTER]
― Another play? ― (AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT)
All right, let's do the Henrys.
Henry the... (MUTTERS UNDER BREATH)
Henry... Oh, my...
All right. chronological order Henry...
― IV, part...? ― AUDIENCE: 1.
― Henry IV, part... ― 2.
Well done.
There's the fat knight, Falstaff.
I'm not going to play Falstaff. It's not the padding.
It's just I've seen too many wonderful Falstaffs,
most recently at the Globe Theatre here in London ― Roger Allam.
Unbeatable.
So...
And then what's the next Henry by Shakespeare? Henry...?
― V. ― V.
There's Kenneth Branagh.
He gets everywhere.
When I heard that he was going to make a film of Henry V,
I thought...cheeky!
Well, because actors of my generation,
Laurence Olivier made his movie ― we didn't need another one.
Well, I was wrong. We did. It was wonderful.
And if it hadn't been, I doubt if I would have had the chutzpah
to challenge Sir Laurence's memory with my own film.
Of course these are the best parts in Shakespeare.
The kings.
There's usually a throne, and you get to sit on it.
And then of course all evening long,
messengers come along with bits of paper
with your part written down on them.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I mean, that's all right until something goes wrong.
There was an actor at Stratford and he was playing Henry V.
And he reached that wonderful scene at the end of the battle when the stage is...
..strewn with the dead French soldiers,
and then a messenger brings in the list of the names of all the dead French,
which the king very movingly reads out.
Unfortunately on this occasion, the king was presented with a blank sheet of paper.
This note doth tell me of 10,000 French which in the field lie slain.
Of nobles in that number there lie dead 126.
These the names of those their nobles that lie dead.
[LAUGHTER]
(UNDER HIS BREATH) Well, fuck you!
[LAUGHTER]
Charles Beaujolais.
And Saint-Émilion.
Pouilly-Fuissé.
Nuits-Saint-Georges...
Champagne.
Veuve Clicquot.
Moët...and Chandon.
Dom Perignon.
And Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
So what are these three Henrys?
― Henry...? ― VI.
― Part? ― 1.
― Henry VI. Part...? ― 2.
― Henry VI. Part...? ― 3.
And at Cambridge, my best mate Corin, Vanessa Redgrave's younger brother,
he adapted the three plays into two
and he directed them, asked me to play King Henry,
and that's how I got to play
two-thirds of Henry VI.
And that leaves just one other Henry by Shakespeare ― Henry...?
― VIII. ― VIII.
And what other title did Shakespeare give it, do you know?
All Is True. Which is the title of...
..a newish film about Shakespeare in retirement.
It was produced by Kenneth Branagh.
[LAUGHTER]
And directed by Kenneth Branagh.
And of course, it stars...
..Judi Dench.
And Kenneth Branagh.
And I'm in it somewhere. And, oh, Ken had the wonderful idea...
He illuminated all the interior scenes of the film
not with electric light, but with candlelight.
Ah! The effect was wonderful.
Great words too by Ben Elton.
All Is True.
― Come on, you're doing well. Yes? ― Richard II.
Richard II. Well, when we were doing Edward II,
I was doing Richard II
on alternate nights in London.
But before that, on the road. Big theatres, 2,000-3,000... No.
(SIGHS) Too big, really. It's so difficult trying to make sure
that everybody in a large, large theatre has a shared experience,
particularly people way up there,
who of course haven't paid anywhere near as much as people down...
[LAUGHTER]
But I was a young actor,
trying to keep in touch, gesticulating, shouting,
running alongside the character, trying to explain to you.
People down here thought I'd gone bananas.
And the performance was full of effects, like...
(BELLOWING) We are...amazed!
(MOUTHS)
OK, next one?
Comedy of Errors? That's the shortest play he wrote. The only farce.
Laughter machine.
Mistaken identities.
Twins.
And the best version I saw was at Stratford.
As a musical. And it was put together by Trevor Nunn.
The first musical he'd done.
If he hadn't done that, there may have been no Cats.
No Les Mis.
Judi was in it, and so was her late husband Mike Williams.
I was in the company but not in the play. So when I'd finished my show,
I'd go and stand at the back and hear them sing and dance,
And you can still hear them sing and watch them dance.
It's all on video.
Comedy of Errors, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1976.
Give yourselves a treat.
OK. Good. Now?
(AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT)
― Say it again. ― Love's Labour's Lost.
Love's Labour's Lost. Yep.
Well, another play that I did at Cambridge as a musical.
Clive Swift wrote the music. He played the piano.
Derek sang Berowne.
I was the old schoolmaster, and shared...
..a song about the greatest, longest word in the play ― one of those nonsense words.
Maybe the longest word in the English language, I don't know.
And it went something like...
♪ All over the world, wherever you go
♪ From the pygmy in the south to the Eskimo
♪ People should be governed, don't you know
♪ By
♪ Honorificabilitudinitatibo
♪ And whenever you go on the land or sea
♪ From the Elephant and Castle to the Ritz for tea
♪ Upper-crusted people will agree on
♪ Honorificabilitudinitatibee
♪ You may feel faintly nervous
♪ With only initatibus
♪ But just add on an honorif
♪ And we think you will agree with us that
♪ If a card may be rather hard
♪ When if you're suffering from the blues
♪ But add a cardilif to your honorif
♪ And after brooding, pop in udin
♪ Then go the whole hog
♪ Singing with us
♪ Honorificabilitudinitatibus! ♪
Altogether now!
♪ Honorificabilitudinitatibus! ♪
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
― Yes, come on. ― Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
That's the... Ah, where are we?
It's the one play of Shakespeare I've never seen. Have you seen it?
Yes. Where have you seen it, can you remember?
― Drama school. ― Drama school. Yeah.
Well, I want to see it, because there's a dog in it.
Crab.
It behaves rather badly.
What's the other play of Shakespeare's with a dog in it?
Don't say Macbeth ― "Out, out, damn Spot!"
[LAUGHTER]
"This lanthorn doth the horned moon present."
Midsummer Night's Dream.
Yes, this dog, my dog ― it's usually a toy dog.
But in Two Gents, it's the real thing ― woof, woof.
I can't wait.
OK, good.
― Timon of Athens. ― Timon of Athens.
I can never forget and I will never forgive myself.
I didn't go and see Paul Scofield play Timon of Athens.
Look, if you hear there's an actor who you admire
going to be in a play that you admire or don't admire or...
Go.
Because one day it'll be too late.
And I feel that about other great performers.
When I was on tour in the United States,
some of the company went down to Las Vegas.
I didn't go with them. So I never saw Elvis on stage.
I didn't hear Sinatra singing in the Royal Albert Hall here in London.
And when I was a lad, I bought a ticket specially for a...
..very, very famous local comic from Wigan.
He was a film star. He was on the end of the pier at Blackpool ―
George Formby.
And it was a nice afternoon. So I didn't bother going.
And I had a ticket for the last performance
that Judy Garland was scheduled to give here in London at the...
..Hippodrome, a Matcham theatre, and I called up beforehand and they said no...
..Judy wasn't well enough and she would not be singing that night.
And she never sang publicly again.
Which is partly why, a couple of weeks ago in London,
I went to see Cher.
[LAUGHTER]
She's about my age, Cher, but my God, you'd never know.
(CHUCKLES) She's looking great.
And I loved her line to the audience. There she was,
looking a million dollars, and she said,
"So what's your granny doing tonight?"
[LAUGHTER]
OK. Come on, we've only got three left. What are they?
(AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT)
Much Ado? Yes, About Nothing.
Oh, well, I've been in that twice,
but I never played Benedick, and I'm too old now.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, you're not!
Oh, yes. I am.
But, you know, it's such an easy part, Benedick.
But you never see a bad Benedick, do you? It's like Romeo and Juliet.
Oh, lads, don't play Romeo. No, you want to play Mercutio.
That's the part.
Yeah. Well, you never see a bad Mercutio, do you?
And of course you're dead by the interval.
So you get to go home.
― What are these two plays? ― Pericles.
Pericles, yes.
Well, that's the last of the four late plays. And they've all got the same plot.
It's all about reconciliation between fathers and daughters.
So, Pericles, a great play to take your daughter to.
A great play to take your father to, really.
Happy ending.
And talking of endings, what's this last play?
― Merchant of Venice. ― No.
(AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT)
Troilus and Cressida.
And you know...
I have nothing to say about Troilus and Cressida.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, congratulations. I think you've scored a record there.
Well, there's the Tempest ― the last play.
Then there's this one.
After all that shouting in large theatres,
we came to do Macbeth in a small one.
The Other Place at Stratford.
120 people scattered around a magic circle
that John Napier had chalked on the bare board.
Very cheap production. It cost £250.
All the costumes came from second-hand shops. Judi wore a tea towel.
If you look closely at the video,
you can see on my tunic, it says
"Birmingham Fire Brigade."
At times, the play seems to be almost happening just...
inside his head, which he opens up
for inspection and shows you his fears and his conscience.
It's not a part to be shouted.
And doing it in The Other Place was the...
best preparation possible for the closest audience of all,
which is the film camera.
At the outset, you know, the Macbeths are the golden couple,
everybody adores them.
Single-handedly he saved his nation from defeat on the battlefield.
He's coming back and he meets the three weird sisters,
who give him their supernatural solicitation,
and then in the arms of his beloved wife...
..he begins to plot the death of the good king, Duncan,
and at that moment, their marriage begins to crack and splinter...
..till, by the end, there is between them...nothing.
This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill...
..cannot be good.
If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success...
Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair...
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature?
Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder...
..yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise...
..and nothing is But what is not.
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.
If the assassination...
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here;
that we but teach bloody instructions,
which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.
He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself.
Besides...
..this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Will blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears will drown the wind.
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition...
..which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other.
Is this a dagger
which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?
Come...
..let me clutch thee.
I have thee not...
..and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight?
Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee still, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.
Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps,
which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take this present horror from the time, which now suits with it.
I go, and it is done.
(BELL TOLLS)
The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
We have scotch'd the snake...
..not kill'd it!
She'll close and be herself...
..whilst our poor malice Remains in danger of her former tooth.
But let the frame of things disjoint, and both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear...
..and sleep in the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy.
Duncan's in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch him further.
I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in't:
I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me.
Wherefore was that cry?
The queen, my lord, is dead.
She should have died...hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow...
and to-morrow, and to-morrow...
Creeps in this petty pace
from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.
Out, out...
..brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow...
..a poor player...
..that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
Signifying...
nothing.
Our revels now are ended.
These our actors, As I foretold you...
..were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers...
..the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit...
..shall dissolve.
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff...
..As dreams are made on.
And our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
[APPLAUSE]
[CHEERING]
[CHEERING CONTINUES]
Thank you.
How does he remember all those words?
[LAUGHTER]
It's astonishing, but most plays were written
not by one person but by a group.
A team. How could that be?
Well, I used to think... and then I did Coronation Street.
Ten episodes, and each episode was written
by a different screenplay writer, and you could not tell. Well, I couldn't.
So it can be done.
And one of the plays that Shakespeare contributed a speech to
was called Sir Thomas More. And the speech is special, and not just for what it said.
But because...
..you can see it in his own handwriting.
Uniquely, of all his works, plays, poems,
the only speech that we have in his actual manuscript...
..is this one from Sir Thomas More.
And you can see it in London at the British Library.
It's on permanent display.
And Thomas More's a lucky play for me,
because it wasn't performed during Shakespeare's lifetime.
I suppose with a Catholic martyr,
Sir Thomas, as the hero,
perhaps the Protestant authorities
wouldn't have quite approved.
And so it had to wait till the 20th century, 1964,
for the first public performance.
This was in Nottingham at the Playhouse, and...
..I was in the company and they cast me as Sir Thomas More.
So you're looking perhaps at the last actor who will ever be able to say
I created a part by William Shakespeare.
[APPLAUSE]
So the plot of the play is taken from real life.
The Apprentice Boys of London are out on the town,
shouting the odds. They're demonstrating just around the corner
in what is now Trafalgar Square,
and they're complaining about the immigrants in London.
Usual complaint about foreigners ― they take our jobs.
They wear odd clothes, they eat odd food.
Better send them back wherever they came from.
And that is the cry ― remove the strangers.
And Thomas More, who's a lawyer, is set out by the authorities...
sent out by the authorities to put down the riot,
which he does in two ways.
One by reading them the Riot Act.
And then with an appeal to humanity,
which you might think not inappropriate 400 years on.
So, now, the crowd....
Would you be the crowd?
Shouting "Remove the strangers!"
AUDIENCE: Remove the strangers!
Remove 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 with their poor luggage,
Plodding to th' ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced 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 Feed on one another.
You'll put down strangers...
Kill them.
Cut their throats.
And lead the majesty of law in line, To slip him like a hound.
O, desperate as you are wash your foul minds with tears,
And those same hands that you like the rebels lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace
And your unreverent knees make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven
And say now the king As he is clement,
If th' offender mourn
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you,
whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour?
Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province,
Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats...
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Made not nor owned not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts, But chartered unto them,
what would you think...
..to be thus used?
This is the stranger's case.
And this your mountainish...
..inhumanity.
[APPLAUSE]
[APPLAUSE CONTINUES]
[LAUGHTER]
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
(IAN CHUCKLES)
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE CONTINUES]
Why, why am I in the box?!
[LAUGHTER]
Because, as Sean said, you would like it.
And why am I in the box?
Well, I'm hiding from Alan Badel.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, I was looking for this.
Whether you know it or not,
today we've been raising funds.
Money ― your money, you paid to get in and you paid for the brochure ―
and I hope you're going to put in my bucket something.
In the words of my compatriot from Ballymena,
the Reverend Ian Paisley...
(NORTHERN IRISH ACCENT) I would like a silent collection.
[LAUGHTER]
Because the causes are good ones, and today there will be more to come, but...
you've been raising funds for the English Touring Theatre,
for the National Youth Theatre,
that brings young people from across the country to discover the delights
of working on live theatre in London, and some of them can't afford to live here.
That's where your money will go.
Today you have actually made two scholarships
at the Welsh College of Opera and Drama,
and money will be going to people who work with blind people,
deaf people and disadvantaged... disabled people,
who can discover the healing joys of being involved in...
..a theatre production. And at the other end of the age scale...
..friends in Denville Hall,
where old colleagues and actors often end their days.
Thank you on behalf of them all.
And one last thing before I go.
Here we are.
Just so I remember we were all here at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
All right.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
[CHEERING CONTINUES]
Bless you!
Bye-bye!
Bye-bye.
(PIANO PLAYS)
(HUM OF CONVERSATION)