BROMANCE TAKES THE BIG SCREEN
McKellen and Stewart cap West End run with live broadcast
One of the great theatrical LONDON bromances of our time is coming to select movie houses.
Onstage co-stars and offstage pals Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are capping a West End run of Harold Pinter’s bruisingly funny No Man’s Land with a live broadcast to dozens of movie theatres around the world as part of the U.K. National Theatre’s NT Live series.
In Canada, select Cineplex theatres will screen the play on Sunday, and again on Jan. 14.
The two eminent actors — both knighted by Queen Elizabeth II — became friends while filming the superhero X-Men movies, and their onstage chemistry has blossomed alongside an exuberant offstage friendship, complete with Instagrammed selfies.
In 2009, they co-starred as the limbo-lost Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. In 2013 on Broadway, they paired Beckett’s drama with No Man’s Land, performing the two plays in rep.
This year they headed back to Britain with Pinter’s tragicomedy about two writers: one struggling but hopeful, the other successful but trapped. As the play opens, McKellen’s eager Spooner has been invited to the home of Stewart’s imperious yet befuddled Hirst for an ocean of booze and a titanic battle of wills.
The play was first staged in 1975, when Pinter was in his 40s. But McKellen says that “it seems to me at my age to be very much about how you cope with aging.”
“One of the characters has a sort of dementia, and his new friend is trying to bring himself back into the real world, which is rather a dangerous thing to do with someone who is living in a fantasy,” McKellen said.
No Man’s Land is frequently mysterious and often bleak. But the interaction of McKellen’s nervy and garrulous Spooner and Stewart’s alternately jovial and menacing Hirst is also very funny. There’s a bravura comic scene in which the two swap increasingly unlikely reminiscences in a game of nostalgic one-upmanship.
“The play is constantly about the shifting of power,” said Sean Mathias, who directed both Godot and No Man’s Land. He said the two lead actors “have a natural chemistry.”
“They are so different and I think there is a kind of contrast that works between them,” Mathias said.
McKellen says the two men were drawn together by their shared background. They’re about the same age — McKellen is 77, Stewart 76 — and both come from modest backgrounds in northern England. Both worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and both played iconic roles in sci-fi and fantasy — McKellen as wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, Stewart as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
And neither is thinking about retirement, though McKellen says “I’ve never had a wish list of parts I’ve wanted to play.”
“I always assumed that I would play Romeo one day, and I did; and Hamlet, and I did,” he said. “There’s nothing that I really want to do.”
They are so different and I think there is a kind of contrast that works between them.
SEAN MATHIAS, director of No Man’s Land