Don't call Sir Ian McKellen's latest collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and its former artistic director Trevor Nunn a "comeback." In the words of Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond, "It's a return."
Not only do the RSC touring productions of King Lear and The Seagull mark the first time McKellen and Nunn have worked together for the venerable company in 17 years, but the shows' stop in Los Angeles beginning Oct. 19 will be the first time the RSC has performed in UCLA's Royce Hall in 33 years.
Los Angeles is one of only three U.S. cities that will host the company, which will perform as part of UCLA Live's Sixth International Theatre Festival. After opening March 24 in Stratford-upon-Avon and touring Northern England, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, the show opened Sept. 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Lichtenstein Theater and will run Oct. 5-14 at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater.
"It's a brave person who does a play in L.A.," McKellen said. "[Theatre is] not the main industry of the town in the way that it is in New York, but I think all of those cinemagoers ought to get out occasionally and go and see a bit of real acting."
UCLA Live director David Sefton said construction crews are about to re-configure Royce Hall for the occasion. The stage will be extended into the audience to create a setting similar to a theatre-in-the-round. "With the exception of the Chinese opera we did last year [The Peony Pavilion], this is the first time I've used Royce for a theatrical production," he said. "It's a very exciting year."
The Grand Tour
Touring has always been in McKellen's blood. As a boy in Northern England, he was first inspired to act while watching master actors -- including Sir John Gielgud portraying Lear -- perform in touring productions.
Still, extensive tours such as Lear and Seagull have their drawbacks. "It can be a pain leaving home, of course, and touring isn't always easy. You don't always stay in the best hotels. You're not on vacation," McKellen said. "It's not a barrel of fun, but the rewards are enormous."
Two such rewards for McKellen are being part of a close-knit company and working with actors in a way that's more intimate than on a movie set. "I enjoy best being in a company. So when the chance came to play Lear, it was right for me that it was with the Royal Shakespeare Company; that's the point," said the actor, who has performed in approximately 20 RSC productions over the years. "I wouldn't want to do just a one-off production of King Lear with an ad hoc group; it's much better to do it with people who have shared attitudes, and that's true when you do something with the Royal Shakespeare Company‌. If you're going to do a complicated, difficult play like Lear, the best place to do it would be the RSC."
In addition to reuniting with Nunn -- who directed him in Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, among other productions during RSC's golden age in the 1970s and '80s -- McKellen relishes the chance to work with a new generation of actors. He's been impressed by his young co-stars' dedication and is pleased to see that the RSC's traditions are alive and well.
"It's very moving to me that there should be actors like Romola Garai, who's got a thriving film career at a very early age and says, 'I'm going to spend a year playing Cordelia in Lear and Nina in The Seagull.' A year of her young life is a huge commitment," said McKellen. The 25-year-old Garai co-starred in Kenneth Branagh's film version of As You Like It last year and has a principal role in the critically lauded Atonement, a film adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel, which premiered recently at the Venice Film Festival in Italy.
McKellen also singled out Richard Goulding, who plays Konstantin in Seagull but has only six lines as a messenger in Lear. "That's the tradition that I think is important to be in contact with as a young actor," said McKellen. "You do it with a group: You're not just in a play because you like the part; it's because you like the idea of working with other actors in a way that you don't always do in film.
"For me as an old man, working with young people is the reverse of what I used to enjoy when I was a kid myself: working with older actors on equal terms," McKellen noted. "It doesn't happen in many jobs that you can be intimate in a professional way with people whose experience is quite different from your own and yet you all meet over the same project and become a group of friends."
Fresh Takes
This tour also gives McKellen opportunities to play in front of audiences who may be experiencing Shakespeare and Chekhov for the first time. He greatly enjoyed seeing Singaporean audience members' fresh reaction to The Seagull, which had never been performed in their country before.
Whether his audience consists of savvy New York theatregoers or Shakespeare neophytes, he imagines that the play has never been performed before, and the actors and the audience are experiencing it for the first time. "The audience I play to really is the bright 14-year-old: someone who is capable of sitting still and listening and watching and feeling for even three hours. I know, as I did at that age, they'll potentially have their lives changed," he said.
Sefton said 15 to 20 percent of UCLA Live audiences are students for whom tickets are a fraction of the general admission price: "At every single show, a percentage of the house is subsidized for students because they're not going to get to see Ian McKellen doing King Lear again -- no one is. But if they get to do that when they're 20, it's something to tell the grandchildren."
'King Lear' and 'The Seagull' run in repertory Oct. 19-28 at UCLA's Royce Hall, 340 Royce Dr., L.A. For information and tickets, visit www.uclalive.com.
Lauren Horwitch can be reached at lhorwitch (at) backstage.com.