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Ian McKellen On Stage – Harold Pinter Theatre What does a theatre critic do on her only day off in a month? She goes to the theatre, of course. I knew that Ian McKellen was celebrating his 80th birthday with a punishing tour of almost every theatre he’s ever played in, more than 80 of them, from tiny spaces in Orkney to the National, from ramshackle school halls in his hometown of Bolton to the beautiful Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond, Yorkshire, and from the Cambridge Arts where he played as an undergraduate to the Royal Shakespeare in Stratford where he had some of his greatest triumphs. I knew that he had decided to make the tour a charity event, with every penny of the profits going to the theatres where he played, to do with as they saw fit, so, unusually, I offered to pay for my ticket. Critics, as you probably know, are customarily invited by the producer to review their play and are therefore guests, not paying punters. I just wanted to spend my Sunday in the company of a great actor, for my own pleasure, without the usual responsibility to tell you about it. I got that and so much more. So much, indeed, that I feel compelled to tell you about it There is nothing boastful about Ian McKellen. If we didn’t know that his King Lear alone has inspired dozens of young actors into the theatre, he wouldn’t be the one to tell us. What he does do is to tell us about his life in the theatre, how his first ambition was to be an amateur actor, acting in his spare time because he thought he wasn’t good enough to be a professional, how he didn’t try to get into drama school because the others were, he thought, so much better. How he found himself at RADA with some of the great actors of his generation but didn’t think he was nearly good enough to think of a future as an actor. A teacher, he thought, like his sister, with a hobby of getting up on a stage and reciting Shakespeare. Alone on stage, wearing jeans that have seen better days, and a t-shirt under a shapeless jacket, he conducts a conversation with us, the audience. “Give me the name of a Shakespeare play,” he asks a lady in the fourth row. “Much Ado About Nothing,” she says, and he’s off into a hilarious or touching or searching story about appearing in the play, who was in it with him, where and when it took place and what it meant. He works through nearly whole canon this way, without most of the audience realising that we’re being subjected to a spellbinding course in playing Shakespeare from the other side of the footlights. And we are active participants, calling out the names of the plays, avid to hear what it’s like to be part of the magic, even while we actually are. McKellen has such mastery that he can change our mood in a second by turning his head or just altering his expression and we stop laughing and sit quiet again so we can listen to whatever is coming next. His longtime director and friend, Sean Matthias, helps out enormously by subtly moving him on and using lighting and props to orchestrate the atmosphere and pace. This performance, in its sense and humanity, transcends theatre. Theatre lovers will eat it with a spoon, as I did, and wish he might continue for another two hours, but I defy even a convinced theatrephobe to come out of the Pinter Theatre, where he is playing a final season of this glorious show, without a smile on your face and a fiver in your hand to add to the charity bucket he is shaking. For there he is, causing a traffic jam in the foyer on our way out, posing for selfies, enjoying yet another joke. Just one of us. Except he isn’t. He’s Ian McKellen. The Watsons – Menier Chocolate Factory Laura Wade’s plays have a habit of blowing themselves up and then finding their way back together again before the final curtain and The Watsons is no exception. It begins conventionally enough, lulling us into the belief that we are watching a new play based on an unfinished novel by Jane Austen’s, complete with Regency costumes and upper class twits in uniform vying for the attention of daft girls in ringlets. I should have paid more attention to the terrible wigs and the awful costumes, and realised that this was a sendup. Just as the heroine is about to accept the marriage proposal of the stuttering Lord of the local manor, a woman in blue jeans and t-shirt bounds on stage to tell the astonished heroine that she is a mere fiction, a character in a book, and not a person at all. The newcomer, however, is Laura, the playwright (she’s not, stay with me here) and she’s come to complete the story so casually begun by Miss Austen by writing the rest of the story as a play. Not so fast, say the other characters – and there are lots of them – we want a say in what happens next. You can’t just arrive and tell us what to do. Laura tries to reason with them but they divide into factions and vote her out. She has a meltdown and retires to her bed, leaving her characters to fend for themselves which they do, disastrously. The real playwright, Laura Wade, actually has a point to make and she makes it amusingly and with wit. Writers, she is saying, even good writers, are not always in complete control of their own inventions. Sometimes, no matter how strong the structure and character map one starts with, sometimes it gets away from you and takes on a life of its own. Sam West directs his large cast with economy and efficiency in a tiny playing area but I suspect that when The Watsons transfers to the West End, which it inevitably must, the play will find firmer feet in a larger space. Big The Musical – Dominion Theatre Big is certainly big. Big stage, big set, big lighting, big choreography, big…. well, you get the idea. But actually, without the charm of Tom Hanks as the little boy who makes a wish at a funfair and finds himself in a man’s body, it’s all rather small. And preposterous, despite the earnest efforts of young Jay McGuinness as Big Josh to entertain us. His presence as man/child is meant to make us believe that this child can fool a successful business man and an entire corporation into believing in his competence to run a business. Seriously? And am I the only one who finds the romance between the child and his grown up love interest, Kimberley Walsh as Susan, a bit, well, creepy? We, the audience, know he’s a child so the fact that the woman doesn’t, and falls in love with him, is a bit, well, creepy, isn’t it? Wait, I just said that. The score is by Maltby and Shire but not perhaps their best. The cast are competent and the dancing and singing are exactly what you’d expect if you made a stage musical from a non-musical film with only one idea. Well drilled but fairly pointless. As always, I like the children in these shows, the adults not so much. More Matilda, I say, more School of Rock, more Annie, more Billy Elliot, more shows where the children actually are the show rather than the window dressing, as here in Big The Musical (lack of punctuation is theirs, not mine).
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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