Ian McKellen Research Articles

A Vicious Viewership

This paper uses the series Vicious (2013–2016), which aired on the British network ITV and the American noncommercial network PBS, as a case study in transatlantic reception for LGBTQ content. I draw on critical reception for the series, the star personae of lead actors Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen, and studies of American perceptions of British masculinities. The varied reception for the series, understood through the networks’ economic models and cultural constructions of masculinities, reveals how notions of “quality” and “social progress” change as canned television travels to different national contexts.

Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner ed. by Edward M. Burns

Reviewed by: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner ed. by Edward M. Burns Tim Conley (bio) QUESTIONING MINDS: THE LETTERS OF GUY DAVENPORT AND HUGH KENNER, edited by Edward M. Burns. Berkeley: Counterpoint Publishers, 2018. Vol. 1: xix + 868 pp., Vol 2: 1871 pp. $95.00 cloth. The correspondence of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner is a feast, though anyone familiar with either or (magis etiam felix) both would guess as much and hardly need a reviewer to convince that person to seek it out. On the other hand, those who have not read The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays and The Pound Era should cease reading this review at once and proceed with all haste to a decent library.1 Having thus perhaps dispelled my entire audience, I will nonetheless proceed for the sake of curious lingerers, for curiosity is not just the abiding but the insatiable quality in these two fat volumes. A scan of a random page of the index—which finds multiple references to Heinrich Schliemann, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Scott, Ronald Searle, the Second Vatican Council, Seneca the Younger, and Dr. Seuss—confirms that the reader will want to have a notebook at the ready (1:xciv, 2:lxvi). The correspondents' shared enthusiasms are, as this index sample might suggest, arrestingly diverse (for example, Marianne Moore, Charles Babbage, Edward Gorey, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Sappho, Buster Keaton, Alan Turing, and Louis Zukofsky). Davenport and Kenner trade publishing news, academic and literary gossip, notes on Greek and Latin, diagrams and drawings, complaints about reviews, and various news items, from the hunt for the elusive Waste Land manuscript to the death of Marilyn Monroe (1:38, 1:478). Davenport exhorts Kenner to watch Stan Brakhage's films and read J. R. R. Tolkien; Kenner recommends Flann O'Brien and Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.2 Even long-time readers of these writers will find surprises, such as the fact that Tolkien so impressed Kenner that at one point he considered using a passage from the Lord of the Rings as an unattributed epigraph to The Pound Era (1: 428).3 (Upon reading this, my imagination, unbidden, cast Sir Ian McKellen in white robes declaiming: Usura, you shall not pass!) There are more casually tossed-off insights and penetrating questions in a few given letters between them than are found in entire monographs. I submit as examples of such sparks Davenport's characterization of Sigmund Freud as "the Cotton Mather of psychology" (2:1531) and his musing about how it "would be interesting to know the first poet who wanted to be a bird" (followed by a tracing of [End Page 433] themes between Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Archilochos (1:813, 813-14), and, from Kenner, this aphorism: "To translate is not different in principle from the imitation of human actions by playing upon the flute. The latter is, by equivalency theories, impossible, but Aristotle opens the Poetics by assuming it can be done" (1:693). As a constant touchstone—or a lingua franca—Joyce is second here only to Ezra Pound, and those interested in the history of Joyce criticism will find many choice morsels. Of the 1971 Joyce Symposium in Trieste, Kenner reports that locals "were tolerant of the fact that many conferees seemed hooked on [Italo] Svevo's friend the visiting Irishman" (2:1356). His 1988 assessment of the Joyce Wars and attendant furors is as decisive as it is wry: John Kidd is "mad," full stop, and "the press always has the complaints [about the Hans Walter Gabler edition] coming from 'scholars,' leaving the naïve to suppose that the work was done by truck-drivers, the lot (1) German, (2) male, (3) using (shudder) computers" (2:1791). In the same letter, he doubts Stephen Joyce's assertion at the recent Venice Symposium that he had burned all letters between himself and Lucia: "It would be like shooting one's hostage" (2:1791). Kenner esteems Fritz Senn and Adaline Glasheen but calls A. Walton Litz "an honest kind of bungler" (1:93) and says...

Logical Family: A Memoir by Armistead Maupin

Reviewed by: Logical Family: A Memoir by Armistead Maupin Robert Kellerman Armistead Maupin, Logical Family: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. Cloth, $27.99; paper, $16.99; e-book, $12.99. Fans of Armistead Maupin’s series of novels collectively known as Tales of the City will find much pleasure in his recent memoir, Logical Family. Like his fiction, it features the incisive characterization, candor, and psychological depth for which Maupin is best known, as well as some of the same wildly improbable plotlines drawn from his own life that have made his novels such compulsive reading. Maupin has met President Nixon, worked for Senator Jesse Helms, had a tour of duty in Vietnam, came out in San Francisco, and began writing the novels for which he is famous as newspaper columns with virtually no plan of how he was going bring the scheme off. Nobody knew, least of all Maupin himself, that these nine novels would become his life work and a mouthpiece for LGBTQ liberation for thousands of devoted readers worldwide. The book’s title is his own phrase, “logical family,” as opposed to “biological family”—that is, the people one chooses to have relationships with as opposed to those one has to by virtue of blood. Maupin is unflinchingly honest about his conservative biological family: his father and brother are distant; his Confederate grandfather looms large in his family mythology; but he finds refuge in his mother, sister, and grandmothers. Interesting as his family is, [End Page 92] his logical family is even more so, including the many people he met as he moved to San Francisco and began his writing career, as well as those he met because of his coming out and subsequent status as a gay public figure: actor Rock Hudson, for example, with whom he had an affair and, following that, a long friendship; actor Ian McKellen; artist Donald Bachardy and his partner, writer Christopher Isherwood. Presumably, Maupin sought to explore how his background created his need for a logical family, and the two subjects—his background and his logical family—do not always connect as clearly as they might. For instance, the chapter Maupin devotes to his stint in Vietnam is fascinating, but it is unclear exactly why its material is important to the larger narrative. There are odd omissions as well. For example, one wonders about his long-term partner Terry Anderson, who is barely mentioned, and about his husband Christopher Turner, who is mentioned often but with no great detail about their relationship: how they met, how their relationship developed, and so on. Given that these would presumably be some of the most important members of Maupin’s logical family, such omissions are puzzling. Perhaps the most surprising omission is one that many readers may be looking for: the development of the nine-novel fictional world he created. There is fascinating material about how the initial six-volume set of novels actually got started but not nearly as much on how it developed and was sustained over time, nor on the final three novels that pick up nearly twenty years after the first six left off. One familiar with his entire corpus might wish the connections between Maupin’s life and his fiction were more fully articulated. These, however, are minor quibbles. One of the attributes of a memoir is its free-form nature, allowing its writer to emphasize what he or she feels is important without necessary regard for logical narrative progression. Alert readers will see the seeds of his greatest character creation, Anna Madrigal, in his grandmother, and his main characters, Mary Ann Singleton and Michael Tolliver, as clearly aspects of his own personality as he came out in San Francisco as a young man: naïve, curious, hopeful, romantic. As his readers know, Maupin is a natural storyteller, and his stories are [End Page 93] well worth hearing. As a panorama of the LGBTQ movement filtered through one man’s experiences, the memoir is a wonderful success in social history. And, as always, Maupin’s humanity and warmth come shining through. As he writes about an intergenerational party of gay men, “This is how the camaraderie of...

Masquerading Early Modern Disability

Building on Katherine Schaap Williams’s (2009) reading of the play, this article uses a disability studies approach to consider Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Loncraine’s adaptation allows modern-day viewers to experience a highly visual (and often intimate) exchange with Sir Ian McKellen as Richard Gloucester. Specifically, Gloucester’s verbal claims of a disability that renders him unsuitable as a leader and a lack of sexual prowess are juxtaposed alongside sexually violent visual actions and imagery—particularly in the form of phallic symbols. The juxtaposition of verbal passivity in opposition to visual aggression demonstrates how Richard showcases or hides his disability as he pursues the throne: the first half of the film features Richard masquerading ability, while the second half features him masquerading disability.

True bromance: the authenticity behind the Stewart/McKellen relationship

ABSTRACTFor public figures with high-profile roles, media interest in professional pursuits is a regular occurrence. When media attention turns from the public role to the private lives of public figures, suggests Graeme Turner, is the moment when a public figure becomes a celebrity. Specially, Richard Dyer suggests, interest in the private lives of celebrities is grounded in the notion that in the private resides the authentic person behind the ‘manufactured mask of fame’. The increasing popularity of social media, and celebrity figures’ use of such intimate platforms of performance, gives rise to a system of representation P. David Marshall terms ‘presentational culture’. A seemingly genuine persona is presented to the public, yet it is one that nonetheless attracts questions of authenticity, especially when that presentation coincides with promotional activities. This article examines the authenticity of the bromance between Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart through the lens of their social media presence. The article explores the narrative of friendship constructed by the actors, and evaluates how their history as friends and recent promotional activity for the film X-Men Days of Future Past and the plays Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land influence the perceived authenticity of their bromance.

Sir Ian McKellen joins healthcare assistants at Wigan's Pride parade.

Healthcare assistants had a brush with stardom when they marched with Sir Ian McKellen at Pride, pictured above.

BSAVA news

Abstract Liverpool Vet School welcomes Sir Ian McKellen, BSAVA 60th anniversary celebrated in JSAP online collection, and more.

Basquiat Cases: Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, and The Alchemist at the Royal Shakespeare Company

Basquiat Cases: Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, and The Alchemistat the Royal Shakespeare Company Grace Godwin HamletPresented by The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 03 12– 08 13, 2016. Directed by Simon Godwin. Designed by Paul Wills. Lighting designed by Paul Anderson. Composed by Sola Akingbola. Fights by Kevin McCurdy. With James Cooney (Rosencrantz), Bethan Cullinane (Guildenstern), Paapa Essiedu (Hamlet), Griffiths (Laertes), Byron Mondahl (Professor of Wittenberg/English Ambassador), Tanya Moodie (Gertrude), Cyril Nri (Polonius), Natalie Simpson (Ophelia), Clarence Smith (Claudius), Ewart James Walters (Ghost/Gravedigger), and others. Doctor FaustusPresented by The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 02 4– 08 4, 2016. Directed by Maria Aberg. Designed by Naomi Dawson. Lighting designed by Lee Curran. Music by Orlando Gough. Fights by Kate Waters. With Will Bliss (Valdes/Good Angel/Scholar), Jade Croot (Helen of Troy), John Cummins (Cornelius/Evil Angel/Friar), Sandy Grierson (Doctor Faustus/Mephistopheles), Nicholas Lumley (Wagner/Friar), Oliver Ryan (Doctor Faustus/Mephistopheles), Timothy Speyer (Pope), Eleanor Wyld (Lucifer/Scholar/Friar), and others. The AlchemistPresented by The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 05 26– 08 6, 2016. Directed by Polly Findlay. Designed by Helen Goddard. Lighting designed by Charles Balfour. Composed by Corin Buceridge. Fights by Kate Waters. With John Cummins (Ananias), Richard Leeming (Abel Drugger), Mark Lockyer (Subtle), Tom McCall (Kastril), Joshua McCord (Dapper), Siobhan McSweeney (Doll Common), Ken Nwosu (Face), Ian Redford (Sir Epicure Mammon), Tim Samuels (Sir Pertinax Surly), Timothy Speyer (Tribulation Wholesome), and others. [End Page 675] The summer saw a series of major auctions, including one in New York that shattered the record price for a canvas. Fixated on the eye-popping bottom lines, publicity pieces hyping the sales barely registered that 2016 was also a major Basquiat anniversary, marking thirty-five years since he achieved gallery representation and merited the Artforumprofile that brought his work to the attention of connoisseurs with little access to the SAMO©—a portmanteau/epocope for “same old shit”—tagged graffiti with which the artist made his name. In contrast, anniversaries were very much in the news in Stratford-upon-Avon where, for the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death, more of the “SAMO” simply would not do. The most high-profile event was Shakespeare Live!, a starry evening with a title that could be read as a descriptor of the April 23 BBC broadcast, or a hortatory appeal for a resurrection at Holy Trinity Church. Among the scenes, songs, and dances was a cheeky sketch wherein a gloom of Hamlets debated the ictics of “To be or not to be.” Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Rory Kinnear, and Sir Ian McKellen represented experienced Danes; Dames Harriet Walter and Judi Dench teased what might have been; Tim Minchin provided comic relief; and HRH Prince Charles himself tottered on stage to offer royal resolution. The company of royals and Shakespeareans ostensibly assembled to tutor Paapa Esseidu, the first black RSC Hamlet, in a production that overtly referenced the year’s other anniversary artist and his assertion that “the black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings” (qtd. in McGuigan 32). Though the influence was less obvious, traces of Jean-Michel Basquiat also appeared in Maria Aberg’s breath-taking Faustusand Polly Findlay’s vigorous Alchemist, rendering all three plays and their protagonists a trio of unlikely Basquiat Cases. Though born in New York to a Haitian father and mother of Puerto Rican background, Basquiat was adamant that his “roots come from Africa” (qtd. in Fretz 151), and summer 2016 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the artist’s dealer-arranged visit to that continent. RSC director Simon Godwin acknowledged his own star’s Ghanaian heritage by placing Elsinore in a West African Denmark, all hazy orange skies, overworked ceiling fans, and fervently chirping insects. Bernardo and “Francisca” exchanged the text’s “bitter cold” (1.1.6) for the djembe/dunun drums that signaled the Ghost, the large machine gun of the soldier delivering letters to Horatio lent fearsome plausibility to pirates lurking off Cape Verde rather than in the North Sea, and the wooden masks and syncretic...

Great Shakespeare actors: Burbage to Branagh

Great Shakespeare Actors offers a series of essays on great Shakespeare actors from his time to ours, starting by asking whether Shakespeare himself was the first-the answer is No-and continuing with essays on the men and women who have given great stage performances in his plays from Elizabethan times to our own. They include both English and American performers such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, Ira Aldridge, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Janet Suzman, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Kenneth Branagh. Individual chapters tell the story of their subjects' careers, but together these overlapping tales combine to offer a succinct, actor-centred history of Shakespearian theatrical performance. Stanley Wells examines what it takes to be a great Shakespeare actor and then offers a concise sketch of each actor's career in Shakespeare, an assessment of their specific talents and claims to greatness, and an account, drawing on contemporary reviews, biographies, anecdotes, and, for some of the more recent actors, the author's personal memories of their most notable performances in Shakespeare roles.

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”: The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”:The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions Michael D. Friedman Coriolanus is queer. I mean to assert, by this statement, that Shakespeare’s play portrays masculine erotic desire in a way that defies traditional categories of sexual identity.1 The play not only challenges heteronormativity by offering several examples of homoerotically-charged dialogue between male characters, but it also contests homosexual identification by including declarations of heterosexual desire by the same male figures.2 The full erotic natures of Caius Martius and Aufidius cannot be confined within the strict parameters of conventional hetero- or homo-sexuality, and yet the stage history of the play, since the mid-twentieth century, reveals repeated attempts to fix what Shakespeare has portrayed as fluid; to stamp as either gay or straight a wellspring of eroticism that defies stability and binary classification. To illustrate this point, I will draw upon material from six British stage productions of Coriolanus that appeared after 1958, when, as James C. Bulman notes, Britain’s Lord Chamberlain relaxed his veto upon the discussion of homosexuality on stage (39). Three of these productions are connected by their casts, as well as by their treatments of male sexual desire. Tyrone Guthrie’s staging at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1963–64 has been generally acknowledged as the first major production to incorporate a homosexual bond between Coriolanus, played by John Neville, and Aufidius, depicted by a young Ian McKellen. Two decades later, McKellen graduated to the title role in Peter Hall’s 1984 production at the National Theatre, which featured Greg Hicks as Aufidius. Their performance incorporated various homoerotic elements, but it stopped short of depicting the two men as homosexuals. Hicks then ascended [End Page 395] to the part of the Roman general opposite Chuk Iwuji as his Volscian nemesis in David Farr’s 2002 RSC production. In this version, Coriolanus did not display a palpable sexual attraction towards his enemy, and all of the production’s homoeroticism emanated solely from Aufidius. The three remaining productions that I will examine here share no cast members, but they do correspond to individual examples within the first set of performances in their attitudes toward the representation of male sexuality. Like Tyrone Guthrie, Gregory Doran, in his 2007 RSC production, depticted Martius and Aufidius as homosexual lovers. Josie Rourke, whose Donmar Warehouse production, which opened in December of 2013 and was broadcast to cinemas around the world by NT Live in early 2014, emulated David Farr by portraying a one-sided eroticism between a homosexually-inclined Aufidius and a heterosexual Coriolanus. Finally, David Thacker’s 1994 RSC staging featured a mutually homoerotic relationship between the two foes that resembled the one in Peter Hall’s production, but Thacker’s version did not exhibit the same striving toward binary categorization of sexuality that is evident in interviews with McKellen and Hicks about their rehearsal process ten years earlier. In fact, by representing the erotic relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius in an intentionally ambiguous manner, Thacker’s production, among those examined in this essay, comes closest to capturing the queerness of Coriolanus. Before Tyrone Guthrie directed Coriolanus, he developed a reading of the play based on now-discredited psychoanalytic theories of the origins of homosexuality, an interpretation that he later embodied upon the stage. As R. B. Parker observes, “Extrapolating from Freud’s connection between overmothering and the narcissistic idealization of other men, Tyrone Guthrie concentrated his […] production at the Nottingham Playhouse on a homosexual attraction between Martius […] and Aufidius (126). In an essay entitled “On Producing ‘Coriolanus’” published in the Laurel Shakespeare edition of the play (1962), Guthrie seized upon Coriolanus’s obsession with Volumnia as the underlying cause of his eroticized bond with his Volscian enemy. As Ian McKellen recalls, Guthrie gathered his cast together on the first day of rehearsals and presented this analysis of the play without revealing its author: “I’m going to read to you this introduction to an American edition of Coriolanus. I agree with every word of it.” This short essay concentrated on Coriolanus’s heroism, under-pinned or undermined by a mother-fixation. His archrival Aufidius was a...

Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare Helen Deborah Lewis Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by Madhavi Menon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Paper $27.95. 512 pages. Shakesqueer, edited by Madhavi Menon, is an impressive anthology of scholarly essays that seeks to unite Shakespearean studies and queer theory, and provides new readings of the entire Shakespearean dramatic canon. In her introduction, Menon offers the anthology’s forty-eight essays as important challenges to conventional interpretations of Shakespeare’s body of work and vehicles for prompting discourse [End Page 229] in the two fields. It is Shakespeare’s position as the untouchable, idolized “Bard” that prevents many scholars from delving into unexplored and potentially erroneous scholarly territory, Menon argues; the marriage of Shakespeare and queer theory is most often prevented by scholars’ feelings of inadequacy—that one must be an “expert” to write about Shakespeare or Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre—or the sense that “queering” Shakespeare or examining his plays through a queer lens is anachronistic and/or poor scholarship. Menon refers to this tendency for scholars to shy away from critical analysis of Shakespeare as “Shakesfear” (5–6). In order to avoid falling into this trap, Menon asks that we question not only our deification of the Bard but also the ways in which we define “Shakespeare” and “queer.” Does “Shakespeare” refer to the playwright himself, his plays, or the ideas behind the plays? When we argue that “queer” is undefined and unlimited in its challenge of normativity, does this extend past sex, gender, and desire? Focusing on three concepts commonly connected with both Shakespearean studies and queer theory—language, identity, and temporality—Shakesqueer challenges the conventions of queer theory in order to enhance and expand upon queer readings of Shakespeare. The anthology’s essays cover the entire Shakespearean canon as well as the so-called “lost plays,” Love’s Labour Won and The History of Cardenio, and are arranged alphabetically by the title of the play they address. The majority of the anthology’s contributors are queer theorists rather than Shakespearean or Renaissance-era theatre scholars. Without the constraints of historical or biographical contexts, these scholars apply queer theory to Shakespeare and vice versa, opening up discussion about the “blind spots” in scholarly discourse that have prevented connections between the two disciplines. Menon states that the abundance of queer scholars is intentional, and insists on the necessity of this choice in order to “keep with the volume’s emphasis on Shaking queerness”: welcoming all ideas; not simply subverting heteronormativity; and not being confined by chronology, nationality, historiography, or philosophy (24). Indeed, Menon believes that for the framework of “queer” to work, the term must be undefined, anti-normative, and unrestricted. The anthology’s most admirable quality is the diversity of its authors’ theoretical frameworks. The essays often provide fresh perspectives on works that many theatre scholars might believe have been exhausted. Unhindered by the pressure of reconciling new interpretations with existing scholarship, even the most famous of Shakespeare’s dramatic works are revisited and deconstructed. In her essay “Milk,” Heather Love deems Lady Macbeth the queerest character in the Scottish play because of her impulsivity and desire for immediate gratification without any consideration for motherhood or womanly empathy. Love argues that Lady Macbeth’s detached, reluctant role of mother and disinterest in familial lineage is inherently queer. In another essay, “Shakespeare’s Ass Play,” Richard Rambuss [End Page 230] considers the erotics of bestial relationships as the central queer element in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In “Fuck the Disabled: The Prequel,” Robert McRuer addresses the queer, erotic potential of Richard of Gloucester’s anti-normative physical disability as imagined in the 1995 film version of Richard III starring Sir Ian McKellen. More historiographic analysis than theoretical interpretation, Sharon Holland’s essay on Twelfth Night assesses the all-male production of the gender-bending comedy at the Globe Theatre in 2002. Framing her discussion around this particular production, Holland posits that Shakespeare’s “gayest” play reinforces the dominance of heteronormative romance, all the while appealing to queer audiences with single-gender productions that suggest homoeroticism. The overarching themes...

Ian McKellen's Richard III: Sexual Fantasy and Its Failure

Shakespeare’s Richard Ⅲ has been generally regarded as a history play which supports the political ideology of the Elizabethan period called “Tudor myth.” Tudor myth, in a way or another, has formed every aspect of Richard's deformed body and character. But Richard's history is a fiction and it is deformed from the outset. This might testify that his history has been calling forth a desire for reconstruction from anyone who has interest in him, and Ian McKellen is one of them. In his film Richard Ⅲ, adapted from Shakespeare’ original play, setting its historical background in 1930s fascist England, he chooses to anchor his filmic interpretation on the psychological and sexual cause of Richard’s evil doings. McKellen places his Richard in the middle between his wishful sexual self-image and undeniable sexual impotence, and lets him fill the empty space with will for power. The opening scene in which Richard's tank with its giant gun breaks through the wall of Henry Ⅵ’s headquarters seems to display his hyper-masculinity with the symbolic phallus of warlike soldier. Iin the following scene of the royal ball his withered left hand hidden in the pocket also seems to arouse an expectation for a fantasy of a giant phallus. In his public address of the “summer of York,” however, the camera closes up his face that is distinguished with exaggerated deep circles and tarnished uneven teeth which underscore his pass over the age of sexual virility. In men’s room scene, while looking down at his urinating penis, he comments on his frustration with “Love.” His frustration with love has come from disfunction of his sexual organ as he has no sex with Anne to whom once he approached in a fantasy of romantic lover. He is a man of political ambition who is not able to produce and continue linear royal line. Richard's fascist ideology and exclusive devotion to his career as a full-time soldier are associated with homosexuality which prevents him from enjoying heterosexual relationship with women. While endeavoring to display his masculinity in sexual fantasy, his sexual incapacity threatens the patriarchal order of royal reproduction. The film proposes Richmond as Richard’s opposition in possession of masculine sexuality, as seen in the scene of the first night of the newly married couple of Richmond and Prince Elizabeth. The final victory of Rivers over Richard in the Bosworth field battle is the victory of one who authorizes himself to be worthy of throne since he can make royal succession possible.

Waiting for Godot, directed by Sean Mathias, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London Cast: Sir Ian McKellen as Estragon, Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, Simon Callow as Pozzo, Ronald Pickup as Lucky, Theatre Royal Haymarket Company, London, UK, 2009.

<i>Waiting for Godot</i>, directed by Sean Mathias, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London Cast: Sir Ian McKellen as Estragon, Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, Simon Callow as Pozzo, Ronald Pickup as Lucky, Theatre Royal Haymarket Company, London, UK, 2009.

Horror, Homosexuality, and Homiciphilia in McKellen's Richard III and Jarman's Edward II

In Richard Loncraine's film version of Richard III (1995), Ian McKellen as Richard experiences "homiciphilia": erotic arousal from the thought of having caused the deaths of his victims. The film also hints at Richard's homosexual attraction to his henchman Tyrell and contains images that evoke the gay bathhouses associated with early outbreaks of AIDS. This negative treatment of deviant sexuality seems startling in a film based on a screenplay by, and starring, the openly gay actor Ian McKellen. By combining these dual markers of Richard's/McKellen's transgressive sexuality, the film leaves itself vulnerable to a reading, characteristic of the backlash against homosexuality in the late 1980s and 1990's, whereby gay men are demonized for deriving sexual pleasure from passing along AIDS to their partners, and through them, to the rest of society. In its treatment of homosexuality, McKellen's movie resembles the classic Hollywood horror films of the 1930s, which portray "the monster" as a stand-in for "the homosexual." As in such films, McKellen gratifies his heterosexual audience by killing off his homosexual protagonist and allowing a "normal" straight couple to regain control of England. McKellen's accommodationist political stance is thrown into relief when one compares Richard III to Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991). Jarman's radical position, which concedes nothing to the straight establishment, celebrates his protagonist's queer sexuality and impels him to rewrite the ending of Marlowe's play to dramatize the victory of queer resistance over heterosexual oppression.

Women Beware Women , and: The Winter's Tale , and: The Merchant of Venice (review)

Reviewed by: Women Beware Women, and: The Winter's Tale, and: The Merchant of Venice Steven Mentz Women Beware Women Presented by the Red Bull Theater at Theatre at St. Clement's, December 9, 2008–January 18, 2009. Directed by Jesse Berger. Set design David Barber. Masks & Headgear Emily DeCola. Hair & Makeup Erin Kennedy Lunsford. Props Sean McArdle. Sound Jessica Paz. Costumes Clint Ramos. Aerial Effects Paul Rubin. Lighting Peter West. Casting Stuart Howard. Music Scott Killian. Choreography Tracy Bersley. Stage Violence Rick Sordelet. With Jeff Biehl (Sordido), Geraint Wyn Davies (Duke), Al Espinosa (Hippolito), Jacob Fishel (Leantio), Jonathan Fried (Cardinal), Jennifer Ikeda (Bianca), Roberta Maxwell (Mother), Kathryn Meisle (Livia), Alex Morf (Ward), Everett Quinton (Fabrito), Liv Rooth (Isabella), John Douglas Thompson (Guardiano), and others. The Winter's Tale Presented by The Bridge Project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Februrary, 10–March 8, 2009. Directed by Sam Mendes. Set design Anthony Ward. Costume design Catherine Zuber. Lighting design Paul Pyant. Sound design Paul Arditti. Hair & wig design Tom Watson. Music Mark Bennet. Music direction Dan Lipton. Casting Nancy Piccione and Maggie Lum. Choreography Josh Prince. Featuring Simon Russell Beale (Leontes), Rebecca Hall (Hermione), Morven Christie (Mamillius), Paul Jesson (Camillo), Dakin Matthews (Antigonus), Sinéad Cusak (Paulina), Hannah Stokely (Emilia), Josh Hamilton (Polixenes), Michael Braun (Florizel), Morven Christie (Perdita), Richard Easton (Shepherd), Tobias Segal (Clown), Ethan Hawke (Autolycus), Mark Nelson (Time), Gary Powell (Bear), and others. The Merchant of Venice Presented by Propeller at the Brooklyn Academy of Music May 6–17, 2009 Directed by Edward Hall. Set design Michael Pavelka. Lighting design Ben Ormerod. Music Propeller and Jon Trenchard. Text adaptation Edward Hall and Roger Warren. Relights on Tour Richard Howell. Production Manager Nick Ferguson. Company Stage Manager Nick Chesterfield. Deputy Stage Manager Claire Henders. Assistant Stage Managers Dawn Maxfield, Bryony Rutter. Costume Supervisor Hannah Lobelson. Wardrobe Mistress Bridget Fell. Production Photographer Nobby Clark. Assistant Director Paul Hart. Sets Built and Painted by Factory Settings. Lighting Equipment supplied by Stage Electrics. With Bob Barrett (Antonio), Sam Swainsbury (Salerio), Jack Tarlton (Bassanio), Richard Frame (Gratiano), Richard Dempsey (Lorenzo), Kelsey Brookfield (Portia), Chris Myles (Nerissa), Richard Clothier (Shylock), Jonathan Livingstone (Morocco), Thomas Padden (Tubal, Aragon), John Dougall (Lancelot Gobbo), Jon Trenchard (Jessica), and others. Who fills the seats? Whose name sells the most tickets? Who really occupies the center of today's early modern productions in New York City? For many of us, of course, the relevant name is William Shake-speare (or Thomas Middleton), but looking back at major Shakespeare productions over the past few years suggests that having a Big Star may be necessary to secure an audience (and a theatrical venue). That star comes to define the production, and his or her name becomes the most [End Page 669] common shorthand for the entire show. Some top-flight directors have marketable names, and surely Trevor Nunn, Rupert Goold, and Robert Falls each provided good publicity for their respective recent productions in New York and Washington, D.C. But most of the publicity (and most reviewers) gave top billing to the lead actors: Ian McKellen's Lear (RSC, 2007–8), Patrick Stewart's Macbeth (Chichester Festival, 2007–8), and Stacy Keach's Lear (Shakespeare Theatre, 2009). These shows and others like them—New Yorkers might recall Denzel Washington as Brutus in Julius Caesar, or Ewan Macgregor's Iago in London, or most recently the "Dr. Who Hamlet" in Stratford—represent one mainstream project in current Shakespeare productions, in which a company leverages a star's power to promote the production, and that decision largely shapes what we see on stage. Shakespeare's own company had a star in Richard Burbage, but, as recent work in the culture of the early modern theatre emphasizes, the King's Men operated through repertory practices, with each actor playing multiple parts in multiple plays. The horizontal connections generated by a stable band of players implies a communal kind of theatre different from what emerges from the radiance of a single star. Ensemble-driven connections came to the foreground in three recent New York productions staged without major box-office names: Red Bull's Women Beware Women, The Bridge Project's The Winter's...

Unstaging King Lear

In 2008, Singapore audiences were treated to two large-scale King Lear productions: the internationally acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company's production, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellen in the lead role, and Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia's The King Lear Project: A Trilogy. The two productions are drastically different in that the former is a production of King Lear proper, while the latter is an experimental project that uses Lear as a frame to explore, discover and critique the nature of stagecraft and audience perception through a series of notable Lear essays. The King Lear Project is not an adaptation of Lear, but a three-night performance about the play. Ho and Borgia's work questions if it is possible to stage Lear, and if there is in fact a ‘right’ and ‘proper’ way to do so. For local audiences, these questions are immensely provocative for several reasons, especially since the Nunn–McKellen Lear has since been declared – by way of critical reviews – the definitive King Lear. The metatheatricality of the Lear Project implicates audience members and demands an understanding from them through active engagement that is otherwise not required in conventional productions. Ho and Borgia's assumptions of audience perception are strikingly accurate and telling, and they consider the complex negotiations between literary and theatrical experiences, or what Ho calls ‘Word and Flesh’. By turning to the history and the processes of staging what is believed to be Shakespeare's most ‘unstageable’ tragedy, the Lear Project also questions the future of Shakespeare's modern theatre. This dossier, which includes an in-depth review of the play, a commentary by an actor in the play, and an interview with the author/director of the Lear Project, hopes to construct a critical and insightful understanding of the making and reception of this original and ambitious piece of work.

MacB: The Macbeth Project (review)

MacB: The Macbeth Project Presented by The African-American Company at the Buriel Clay Theatre, San Francisco, California. September 19-October 5, 2008 and Willow High School, Crockett, California. March 9-March 20, 2009. Directed and adapted by Victoria Evans Erville. Lighting designed by Kevin Myrick. Set designed by Atom Gray. Costumes designed by Steven Lamont. Choreography by LaTonya Watts. Fights directed by Dave Maier. Music by Dogwood Speaks and Johnathan Williams. Teaching by Sherri Young. With David Moore (Macbeth), Melvina Jones (Lady Macbeth, Melody), Johnathan Williams (Banquo, Hipcat, Macduff), Maikiko James (Witch 1, Old Man, Ensemble), DC Allen (Witch 2, Porter, Ensemble), Toya Willock (Witch 3, Lenox, Ensemble), Clifton Jones (Duncan, Ross), Levertis Stallings (Fleance), and others. San Francisco's African-American Company recently finished staging its second hip-hop Macbeth. This time it's a Not too long ago, at the height of the culture wars, any combining hip-hop and seemed like the radical and inventive solution to increasingly turbulent racial politics and troubled divisions between high and low culture, but today we can find and hip hop conjoined in a host of pedagogical and performance practices. Stephen Greenblatt has enthusiastically endorsed Flocabulary's hip-hop curriculum, is Hip Hop, and Ian McKellen recently recorded a rap version of Sonnet 18 before joining Akala, a British rapper claiming to be Shakespeare reincarnated, to form East London's Hip Hop Company. The San Francisco Bay Area is no stranger to hip-hop Shakespeare. In 2006, we saw Jonathan Moscone and the California Theater performing Naomi Iizuka's hip-hop remix of Hamlet, Blood in the Brain, at San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts. In 2007, we saw Ayodele Wordslanger Nzinga direct West Oakland's Lower-Bottom Playaz in her localized and poetic hip-hop adaptation of Macbeth, Mack, A Gangsta's Tale. It's no surprise, then, that this year the Bay Area, home of everything Mac, from Oakland's The Mack (1973) to Vallejo's Mac Dre, hosted a play calling itself MacB. The Macbeth Project. What did the African-American Company add to the mix with their Macbeth Project? We might begin by looking at what made the AASC's Macbeth a project. The word project evokes corporate and artistic collaboration at the same time that it conjures the specter of public housing. As an action, project is doubly verbal, containing both language and movement; to is to utter in the linguistic or theatrical sense, but it also includes the spatial emanation which results from such utterances. A can be simultaneously an eidos, its logos, and its telos. The AASC's performs all of the above. The Macbeth Project is an ensemble of sites and institutions, players and pupils, actions and ideas. Partially funded by an NEA grant as part of the latter's Shakespeare for a New Generation initiative, the Macbeth Project conjoins performance and pedagogy as its teaching artists engage at-risk Bay Area youth in theatre games through their Shake-It-Up program (The NEA's Shakespeare for a New Generation program is part of the larger Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, both of which are partially supplemented by funding from the US Department of Defense and the Department of Justice's Office of Justice and Juvenile Delinquency Prevention). The Macbeth Project involves schools in San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and Crockett. As a series of nodes in a larger network of projects, the Macbeth Project operates, in part, as the local and mobile expression of a national arts pedagogy as it projects itself through local voices and bodies. I attended a performance of MacB towards the end of its run in San Francisco. Before taking my seat in the Buriel Clay Theater, I decided to get a closer look at Atom Gray's set. …

Integrating multimodal analysis and the stylistics of drama: a multimodal perspective on Ian McKellen's Richard III

Traditionally, stylistic analyses of drama have tended to concentrate on the analysis of dramatic texts rather than dramatic performances. This has been on the basis that no two performances of the same text are entirely alike, and that accurate critical discussion is therefore impossible unless we can be sure that everyone concerned has seen the particular performance we are analysing (Short, 1981). Nonetheless, some performances of plays incorporate production elements that seem to add substantially to the original play script, and which arguably guide our interpretation of the play. In such cases, a stylistic analysis which ignores these production elements is arguably impoverished and incomplete. There appears, then, to be some tension between being methodologically rigorous and producing a complete stylistic analysis of a play which takes into account production and performance elements. However, in the case of plays which have been filmed this methodological problem can be circumvented, since the film version constitutes a permanent record of a particular production of the play in question. In this article I demonstrate the value of taking into account the multimodal aspects of drama by analysing the soliloquy scene from Ian McKellen's film version of Shakespeare's Richard III. I argue that in order to provide a multimodal analysis of the play that matches a traditional stylistic analysis in terms of level of detail, it is necessary to work from a transcript that incorporates linguistic, paralinguistic and non-linguistic elements of the production. As a result of my analysis, I suggest that the multimodal elements of the production contribute to our interpretation of the play as much as the linguistic elements of the dramatic text.

A Knight of the Realm vs. the Master of Magnetism: Sexuality, Stardom, and Character Branding

Since 2000, Sir Ian McKellen has transformed from Shakespearian thespian into a fixture of franchise film series like Lord of the Rings and X-Men. For the openly gay McKellen, participation in franchises – and particularly his portrayal of the oppressed minority and mutant radical Magneto in X-Men – presented a chance to position recognizable character brands within his star text and its ongoing engagement in gay politics. What results, however, was not perfect appropriation with the McKellen celebrity image but instead a more fraught tension between two competing forms of media marketing: stardom based in the management of personality and intellectual property networks based in content controlled directly by corporations. This article first contextualizes these tensions between intellectual property and stardom within a longer trajectory of filmic product differentiation and shifts between vertical and horizontal integration. Second, the article examines the branding of Magneto as an intellectual property, consistently constructed as a fascist villain across multiple media. Finally, the article explores how the management of Ian McKellen's star text worked to alternatively mobilize that property as a potential site of queer activism – a project ultimately confounded by the changing conditions of star representation and labor in the franchise systems of contemporary transmedia economies. Neither the McKellen persona nor the Magneto property could fully contain the other as sites of contested image and meaning, but they simultaneously and unevenly inflected one another as a result of that intertextual struggle.

Macbeth (review)

Reviewed by: Macbeth Michael J. Collins Macbeth Presented by the Chichester Festival at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, England. May 25-September 1, 2007. Directed by Rupert Goold. Designed by Anthony Ward. Lighting by Howard Harrison. Music and Sound by Adam Cork. Video and Projection by Lorna Heavey. Movement by Georgina Lamb. Fights by Terry King. With Paul Shelley (Duncan), Scott Handy (Malcolm), Ben Carpenter (Donalbain, Young Seyward), Patrick Stewart (Macbeth), Martin Turner (Banquo), Michael Feast (Macduff), Mark Rawlings (Lennox), Tim Treloar (Ross), Bill Nash (Angus), Tom Bulpett or Mike Jeffery (Fleance), Christopher Knott (Old Seyward), Christopher Patrick Nolan (Seyton), Hywel John (Bloody Sergeant, Murderer), Kate Fleetwood (Lady Macbeth), Suzanne Burden (Lady Macduff ), Lara Rees (Witch), Polly Frame (Witch, Gentlewoman), Niamh McGrady (Witch), and others. After working on the stage in London and Stratford-upon-Avon for over twenty years, Patrick Stewart left for Hollywood in 1987 where he found fame (and fortune) first as Captain Picard in the television and film versions of Star Trek and then as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men trilogy. He did not act again in a Shakespeare play in England until 2006 [End Page 187] when he returned to play Antony (with Harriet Walter as Cleopatra) and then Prospero for the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works Festival in Stratford and London. Although he had "for decades . . . almost never been south of the Thames" (The Independent, 3 August 2007), he next signed on to do Macbeth and Malvolio at the Chichester Festival in summer 2007. When Dominic Cavendish asked him, in the midst of a miserable, flooded summer in England, if he missed the sunshine of Los Angeles, he said, "not for an instant. . . .I feel as if Shakespeare is coursing through me at the moment. It's exhilarating. Why would I want to abandon that which is most alive inside me?" (The Daily Telegraph, 16 July 2007). After spectacular reviews in Chichester, Macbeth transferred in December to the Gielgud Theatre in London at about the same time Ian McKellen's King Lear returned to London from its world tour, and Othello, with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor, opened at the Donmar Warehouse. The three productions sold out at once, and, as tickets for each reached several hundred pounds, Michael Billington suggested in The Guardian that "if you add Shakespeare and sci-fi movie fame [Ian McKellen played Magneto, Professor Xavier's mutant adversary, in the X-Men trilogy, and Ewan McGregor played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars films], you could probably fill Wembley stadium" (The Guardian, 6 December 2007). Macbeth opened in February 2008 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the RSC, perhaps recognizing the wisdom of Michael Billington's words, cast Patrick Stewart as Claudius in a production of Hamlet that opens in Stratford in July, 2008, with David Tennant (television's Dr. Who) in the title role. Except for the long interlude in Hollywood (during which he did The Tempest in Central Park and on Broadway and a racially reversed Othello at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington), Patrick Stewart had consistently played Shakespeare throughout his career, and he was widely recognized as an accomplished Shakespearean actor. Lured "south of the Thames" then both by his celebrity and his earlier work on the stage, I arrived around noon in Chichester for a Wednesday matinee. Since the box office had not yet opened, however, I went for lunch at the Festival's Chic Café. And there, sitting alone at a table in the back of the Café, was Patrick Stewart: no paparazzi, no Trekkies, no entourage, only a pot of tea and a cell phone. Although I had once, many years ago, organized a performance of his Shylock and Other Strangers for him at Georgetown University, I resisted the desire to re-introduce myself (he would never in any case have remembered me), pretended not to see him, and thus [End Page 188] allowed him to pretend he had become what he had suggested (in the interview with Dominic Cavendish) he wanted to become that summer-a more or less equal member of an acting company at a summer festival. Halfway through lunch, Patrick Stewart left the Café, although...