Arts

Ahead of a new RSC production, the theatrical legend, Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans compare notes on playing Christopher Marlowe’s taboo-breaking king across three generations.

In 1969, long before the era of intimacy co-ordinators, Ian McKellen kissed a succession of would-be co-stars for a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, to see who among them would be best to lock lips with.

“I was thrilled to play a gay man,” McKellen recalls of the auditions to play the king’s favourite, Piers Gaveston. “The actor who got the part [James Laurenson] was straight, and he was a very good kisser.”

This year McKellen, 85, has been mentoring another gay actor about to take on the role. Daniel Evans, the RSC’s co-artistic director, will play Edward II in Stratford-upon-Avon — where he anticipates audiences will be shocked by his staging of the king’s violent, apocryphal death: a red-hot poker inserted up”./+”*um. Evans has also been taking advice from Simon Russell Beale, who played England’s first gay king for the RSC in 1990. “You don’t have to be gay to play Edward II,” McKellen says, laughing. “But it helps.”

Marlowe’s 1594 play explores the passion between Edward and Gaveston, and the machinations to separate Edward from the crown by those who were suspicious of their relationship, led by his queen consort, Isabella of France, and her lover, Roger Mortimer.

Evans, 51, hopes his new production will feel “like a short, sharp shock” at an interval-less 1 hour 40 minutes. The actors are dressed in white shirts and black trousers, intended to conjure up Thirties-era fascism and the Bullingdon Club.

“We want to investigate the intersection between being gay and being king,” he says. “Edward can no more choose to be king than choose to be gay. Added to that is a potent triangle of demands on his being, which involve his own entitlement, sense of shame and misconception of what leadership is.”

Evans, Beale and McKellen played the character in three distinct eras for LGBT people and found the play groundbreaking and meaningful on a personal level. “I had no reticence about the kissing,” Beale says. “I’ve always been gay. I was more surprised by the negative reactions. A teacher came with their class and complained it was about gay people, to which you can only say, ‘Have you actually read the play?’” He played Edward’s execution scene naked. “I think for people watching it was more upsetting than it was for me. There was no pressure to be beautiful. My body felt like a piece of meat.”

Beale adds that a couple of people walked out of the recent Hampstead Theatre production of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, in which Beale played the academic and poet AE Housman —again, “apparently appalled because it was about gay people. I thought homophobia had disappeared by now. It’s a reminder it still exists. Most of the audiences were fine.” Evans notes that at recent performances of the Dolly Parton musical Here You Come Again, a scene featuring a gay kiss has received shouted abuse.

When McKellen played Edward in Edinburgh in 1969 homosexuality was still illegal in Scotland (and remained so until 1980). A local councillor objected to the play being performed within a Church of Scotland-owned property, but police declared it “fit for consumption”, McKellen recalls. “Thanks to all the publicity the play sold out.”

That production came soonafter the Stonewall riots in New York and two years after homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales. But McKellen says he was an “ignoramus” at the time, making “no connection” between the play and the changing world around it.(It wasn’t until 1988 that he came out, aged 48, and a year later co-founded the campaign group Stonewall.)

Many of that Edinburgh cast were gay. “We were very aware that homosexuality was illegal in Scotland,” McKellen says. “We also had a sense that it was our play, although it wasn’t billed or directed as overly gay propaganda. Edward isn’t a very attractive character. He starts the play as someone who is innocent and beautiful in his love for Gaveston, then becomes a bit of a monster.”

The play “is not gorgeous like [Marlowe’s] Tamburlaine, and it doesn’t have the jewels and textures of Doctor Faustus,” Beale adds. “But Marlowe is excellent at power — its expression, indulgence, exercise and what happens when it is threatened. Mortimer and the queen were appalled by rules not being followed.”

For McKellen, Edward II is a rattling good story with superb language, engaging audiences from beginning to end. Marlowe is rougher, tougher, less subtle than Shakespeare. It’s bold colours and very satisfying to perform.”

His Edinburgh production transferred to London and in 1970 was made into a TV play — containing the first same-sex kiss on British TV. “I still hear from men of my generation who say that kiss was a huge moment for them,” McKellen says. “I think the greatest moment of my career was, after one performance at the Piccadilly Theatre, introducing Noël Coward and Rudolf Nureyev backstage — both closeted gay men.”

Jarman’s 1991 film Edward II, starring Steven Waddington and Tilda Swinton, reimagined the story in an early Nineties gay milieu, featuring riot police and an army composed of drag activists and members of Peter Tatchell’s direct-action group OutRage!

McKellen found the film “very entertaining, though Jarman wasn’t best pleased with me. He thought I was a straight man in gay clothing.” McKellen’s besuited lobbying at Stonewall was in contrast to the direct-action tactics the director supported.

“Jarman thought I should become a queer artist when I came out and that I should have declined my knighthood [in 1991],” McKellen says. “He asked me to do Edward II. With a smile on my face I said, ‘Oh darling, I did that play years ago.’” McKellen laughs. “Before he died he relented and said he thought Stonewall had done a great job, which it had.”

The first out actor McKellen knew was Simon Callow. “He saw no point in the closet at all,” McKellen says. “I remember Sir Alec Guinness taking me out to lunch, saying, ‘Are you sure you should be getting involved in politics?’ But I wasn’t going to take any lessons from him. He was a great actor, well intentioned, but he had problems accepting his own nature.

“He was from a different generation, like poor old John Gielgud, who used to send little sums of money to Stonewall regularly. On his 90th birthday I said, ‘Sir John, could you give us a present and allow Stonewall to say you support us?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to bring it all up again’ – meaning the scandal around his 1953 conviction for “persistently importuning male persons for immoral purposes”. McKellen recalls: “Sir John said, ‘When I die I’ll only be remembered as the first queer to be knighted.’ It was all such a pity.”

Even if the word “gay” and our contemporary notions of sexuality did not exist in Marlowe’s time, McKellen, Beale and Evans believe the playwright intended to portray the Edward-Gaveston relationship as loving. “They want to be together and can’t understand why the world is against that,” Evans says.

It was also part of an existing gay pantheon, McKellen says. In The Merchant of Venice Antonio is besotted with Bassanio. “In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night [another] Antonio is besotted with Sebastian. King James VI, known as ‘Queen James’, was likely the first bisexual monarch. He wrote beautiful, heartbreaking letters to his boyfriends. Homosexuality was in the air, even if who slept with whom was not an issue people were marching in the streets about. It was going on, and known to be going on, in the highest echelons of society.”

This new production of Edward II comes at a time when established rights are coming under pressure. Multiple US states are seeking to end same-sex marriage. “We always have to be alert,” McKellen says. “In this country, I hope because of gay marriage, more people are less frightened and more accepting of gay people. Elsewhere the picture is not so good.”

Evans and McKellen note that there has still been no openly gay prime minister, best actor Oscar winner or Premier League footballer. “In women’s sport it’s not an issue,” McKellen says. “I would imagine young footballers are probably, like actors, getting very bad advice from agents who are worried about their own incomes. But the first Premier League footballer to come out will become the most famous footballer in the world, with all the agencies begging for his name on their products.”

“I have never met anybody who came out who regretted it,” McKellen adds. “I feel sorry for any famous person who feels they can’t come out. Being in the closet is silly — there’s no need for it. Don’t listen to your advisers, listen to your heart. Listen to your gay friends who know better. Come out. Get into the sunshine.”