SIR IAN GOES SOLO
Introducing A Knight Out
From the programme for the first UK shows (1994)
The first time I saw a ballet, as a child, I was dreadfully disappointed
— no-one had warned me that classical dancers don't talk. Until then, my
favourite entertainment had been pantomime. In Cinderella and Babes
in the Wood, the entire cast had danced and talked — and sang, after a
fashion. Christmas shows were such fun, because there was so much going on and
there were so many performers in them — animals as well as humans. For the
rest of the year, week after week, at the Grand Theatre in Bolton, I was
thrilled by variety bills of solo acts — comics, singers, magicians, acrobats
— and strippers. But the idea that one person might try alone to hold an
audience's attention for 2 hours? — that seemed as odd as a dancer who didn't
speak.
Beyond the theatre, in the 50's, I was quite used to one-person
entertainment. At our Congregational Church, for instance, I sat quietly
through the 20 minute sermon each Sunday and had fun analysing the preacher's
rule of three: "first tell them what you're going to tell them; then tell
them; then tell them what you've told them". At home we all used to listen to
Alastair Cooke's weekly Letter from America, which was just as
enjoyable as the full BBC Repertory Company in Saturday Night Theatre.
And one unforgettable 1955 morning, in the run-up to the general election, I
heard Aneurin Bevan on the stump in Bolton's market square. His rhetoric
didn't need a supporting cast.
Since then, some of the most enjoyable theatre I have seen have been
solo shows. Roy Dotrice's Brief Lives, Lena Horne's The Lady and her
Music, Ken Dodd and Lily Savage time and again. Even so, when the
Edinburgh Festival threw down the challenge in 1977 and asked me to devise my
own one-man show, I was apprehensive. What on earth could I do? a play a
lecture or some stand-up comedy? As I was working for the Royal Shakespeare
Company at the time, I decided to plunder my experience of acting in
Shakespeare's plays. That became the title of my anthology of famous speeches
and reminiscence: and intermittently for over 10 years, I toured the world
with Acting Shakespeare.
I did it in regular theatres up and down the country as well as in
village halls and institutes and classrooms. I took myself off, thanks to the
British Council, to Cyprus, Israel, USSR, Romania, Scandinavia and right
across the United States. I played Broadway for a season and eventually the
West End. In New York, I recorded the video version, which is still used each
day as a teaching aid in American schools and colleges.
Working as you go, is the best way to travel. It's true that you may
miss some of the famous sights and sites that holidaymakers crowd in on; but
the compensation is that the minute you arrive in a new city you plug into the
local energy and quickly understand the undercurrent of daily life there. At
the same time, it was surprising how popular Shakespeare's original language
is, way beyond the English-speaking world. That's a point I have been making
recently, as the funds are raised to film my screenplay of
Richard III.
Now that Acting Shakespeare has been retired with other discarded
scripts, I have developed this second solo show. As recently I've been
exploring the territory of films and television on location in Hollywood,
Montana, San Francisco, Sussex, Dorset and Netting Hill Gate, I have worried
that I haven't done a play for over three years. Earlier this year, it felt
high time to get back onstage. So I was glad to be invited to take part in the
New York Cultural Festival celebrating the
25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots — more of that in the show itself.
My starting point was to re-live some of the high spots of my career in
plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Shaffer and to explore how my public acting
related to my private experiences as a gay man, growing up in a family who
never discussed sex or sexuality and, more recently attacking those laws and
attitudes which discriminate against me and my kind. As with Shakespeare, gay
goings-on have a universal fascination, it seems. In Johannesburg, where
A Knight Out had its second airing in
September, the audience was as enthusiastic as New Yorkers had been in June.
Now it's your turn to see what you think. I thank you for coming, partly
because all the proceeds are to go to Stonewall and local groups with the same
agenda of attaining legal and social equality for lesbians and gay men in the
UK. But I also thank you for your trust that an actor alone onstage can be at
least as entertaining as dancers who don't talk. — Ian McKellen,
November 1994
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