Sir Ian McKellen is touring the States with the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in both King Lear and The Seagull. Last night–on one of the knight’s few nights off–he was the Guthrie Theater’s speaker for their annual “Global Voices” forum. It was a delightful and inspiring event.
Looking relaxed and happy, McKellen strolled onto the stage wearing a gray suit and a brightly colored Macbeth tartan tie, which he said he saves for “special occasions” and which matches a tie he once gave to Laurence Olivier.
In his conversation with Guthrie director Joe Dowling, McKellen shared stories about working with Tyrone Guthrie, Trevor Nunn, and all the great theater directors. He had the audience in stitches when he told a story about Tyrone Guthrie’s “discovery” of actor Michael Crawford’s talent for slapstick, illustrating his tale by stumbling clumsily across the stage with an imaginary dinner tray on his shoulder. He admitted that when he was young he never aspired to be a great Shakespearean actor–he would have been happy, he said, with becoming a great Agatha Christie actor. And when he answered questions from the audience, he was very humble, very kind, and very real.
I attended McKellen’s talk with a group of friends, one of whom was lucky enough to have a “Sir Ian” connection, so we were all able to meet him after the forum. I was too starstruck to say anything coherent, but he was wonderfully gracious and sweet to us all.
The best part of the evening was a special treat that McKellen reserved for the end of the forum. He performed a beautiful soliloquy from the little-known Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More, which is widely believed to be partially written by William Shakespeare. This collaboratively written play exists in only one manuscript, now in the British Museum, and the very first performance on record was in 1964, with Ian McKellen in the title role.
The soliloquy that McKellen shared with us last night is from the section of the Sir Thomas More written by Shakespeare himself. It’s a condemnation of xenophobia, a cry for peace, and I am so glad that I got to hear it. Sir Thomas tells an angry crowd of immigrant-haters to imagine being “strangers” and refugees themselves:
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 and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in the ruff of your opinions clothed:
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail.
An important message for our time.
