The Measure of a King

In November, 2007 Trevor Nunn's production of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company made its final stop at the New London Theatre in London's West End after an international tour that took it from Stratford-upon-Avon, where it ran for twelve weeks in the spring of 2007, to Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. The RSC clearly counted upon the recent Hollywood celebrity of the actor cast in the title role, Sir Ian McKellen, to ensure the tour's financial success, and box-office returns were certainly helped by McKellen's decision (reached spontaneously, it appeared, at one of the pre-press night performances at Stratford) to let Lear's trousers fall to the ground when he is out in the storm-blasted heath in act three. There was some cynicism amongst bloggers in the UK about the stripping, as it was viewed as an attempt on the part of the RSC to compete with theatrical spectacles in the West End, where, only two weeks before McKellen first stripped, Daniel Radcliffe, famous as the lead in the Harry Potter films, had made his stage debut in a revival of Peter Shaffer's Equus starkers. Other bloggers, however, were ecstatic. "Gandalf is HUNG," wrote one (www.bodyjewelleryshop.com, 4 May 2007). The nudity became, as Jeremy McCarter put it in New York Magazine, "the talk of three continents" (17 September 2007), and by the time the production reached the final stop on the international tour, UCLA's Royce Hall, patrons were paying upwards of $2,000 on eBay for seats on stage that placed them within feet of McKellen.

The decision to strip was, by all evidence, McKellen's. McKellen dropped his trousers for the first time, in performance, on Saturday, 24 March 2007, some ten days before the scheduled press night of 3 April. The nudity, unscheduled and unadvertised, resulted in a spate of complaints for which McKellen's agent (unnamed in press accounts) was appointed to respond. She claimed that the nudity had not been advertised to audience members by the RSC because "the director [was] still making artistic decisions about the production" (www.starpulse.com, 26 March 2007). But with his choice to strip on 24 March, McKellen had forced his director's hand. The choice earned the production additional press coverage on the first stop of the international tour, Singapore, where McKellen was not allowed to remove his clothes on stage. In conversations with the international media there and media at the next stop, in Wellington, New Zealand, McKellen complained about Singaporean prudery and its laws on homosexuality. The stripping, it seemed, had its uses over and beyond what it signified in terms of theatrical performance.

Bloggers were at liberty to create the story about the production for the greater part of the initial run at Stratford-upon-Avon, for, the week after McKellen first went nude, Nunn called a halt on the official opening of the production, delaying the press night on the basis that Frances Barber, cast in the role of Goneril, had been in a bicycle accident. UK theatre critics were bemused. They could not understand why they could not review the production with Barber's understudy, Melanie Jessop, in the role. Five weeks into the delay, with no official opening of the production yet in sight, Adrian Hamilton noted in the Independent (10 May 2007) that resentment was building among the "critical corps." In the meantime, Germaine Greer notoriously broke the "embargo" on reviews, declaring, in no uncertain terms, her...