Ian Mckellen
One-man show is a five-star performance
Darkness. A great blast of the soundtrack from The Lord of The Rings – and in the pitch black, the instantly recognisable voice of Sir Ian Mckellen; warm, craggy, emphatically dramatic, quietly roaring out words from Tolkien’s novel.
Lights up, and there he is – Gandalf in the flesh, unplugged; dangling off an uncomfortable stool, dandyish in tight black trousers, dark jacket, low-trailing knotted scarf – giving us page after page and a line to conjure with: “You cannot pass!” Yes, let it be known, the celluloid catchphrase for which he is renowned the world over (“You shall not pass!”) is nowhere in the original.
Just one of the minor insights that makes this fancily priced fundraiser for the valiant – publicly unfunded – Park Theatre in north London worth every penny. You might argue that there are even better causes for Mckellen, 78, to harness his renown to, but there’s no quibbling about the wry, wistful love letter to the medium that made him and a walk down memory lane with us not as gawping admirers but confided-in pals. The first half teems with childhood memories of Wigan and Bolton – his transformative theatre-going, watching from the wings, then early days in rep.
Literary passions rather than personal confessions dominate, although a glorious tranche of Wordsworth’s The Prelude acts as a droll detour to his coy coming-out to his family at the age of 49.
There’s a memorable rendition from Bleak House but it’s not all serious – he drapes his scarf over his head, puckers his lips and camps it up as Widow Twankey.
And then it’s a full hour of Shakespeare: golden hits, in which the ghosts of performances past are summoned, among them Justice Shallow, Romeo, Macbeth and, bringing us to the present, lines from Sir Thomas More in defence of immigrants. If it’s a crime to abuse the dispossessed, you’re left feeling it would be a crime too for this not to be filmed and reach a wider audience. A palpable hit.