SIR Ian McKellen was recently mistaken for a homeless man.
The actor, best known to many Kiwis as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, was not offended.
McKellen was taking a breather on a Melbourne park bench between rehearsals for his role of homeless man Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot.
“[A man] came along and dropped $1 in my bowler hat, and said, ‘do you need some help, brother?’” laughs McKellen.
“I now keep the $1 with me in my dressing room for good luck,” he says.
He will return to Wellington and bring the play he’s now performed 300 times with him.
Waiting for Godot is considered by many as the most significant English language play of the 20th century.
It comprises of two acts, in which two characters, Estragon and Vladimir, wait for someone named Godot, who never actually appears.
Samuel Beckett’s accomplishment was famously described by Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier, who said, “[he] has achieved a theoretical impossibility – a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.”
McKellen’s not sure the comment is completely fair.
“An awful lot happens to the characters. To the audience it may not be important, but it is for [the characters] because this is their lives,” he says. “This business of waiting – we think we’re busy doing things, getting our degree, but actually an awful lot of the time we’re just waiting, for the right job, or for Christmas. It’s a big part of our lives, and that’s what Godot is. The play’s message is ‘get on with life and enjoy it’.”
When McKellen first saw Waiting for Godot in the 1950s, he didn’t like it.
“My attention span wasn’t great,” he laughs, adding he’s now a fan. “I wouldn’t still be doing it otherwise – I just did my 300th performance. [I like that] the character is my own age, and he has all the same problems people my age do, like dodgy prostate.”
Each performance is subtly different, and he says Wellington is lucky because it will get him at the end of a run at his strongest.
“I used to think the job as a professional actor was to be the same every night, but you’re wasting your time, because you can’t be the same – you’re 24 hours older than you were, and the audience is different,” he says.
McKellen says this season of Waiting for Godot has given him the opportunity to catch up with old friends, such as Roger Rees who plays Vladimir and worked with McKellen at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s, and his former partner Sean Mathias, who directs the play.
It’s also given him the opportunity to catch up with Kiwi friend and painter Nick Cuthell, who he met on Cuba Mall one night after a Hobbit party.
Cuthell, now based in London, has painted eight oil portraits of characters from Waiting for Godot, which will be on display at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery from June 28.
“We thought it would be a really fitting tribute to the play and actors to paint portraits of the characters,” says Cuthell. “To have the paintings accompany the production to New Zealand, where they can be seen in my home town, is a huge thrill for me.”
He’s already seen Waiting for Godot at least six times, and is looking forward to seeing it again in Wellington with new cast member Brendan O’Hea who plays Lucky, “I’m positive a painting will once again suggest itself”.
McKellen says the first thing he’ll do on arrival in the Capital is go and have an egg on toast at the Chocolate Fish café.
“Then I’ll turn right and keep going along that road that eventually ends up in a quarry, and get out and wonder what life is all about,” he says. “I’m not waiting for life. I’m busy doing it, and I’ll work as long as I can. Eventually, I suppose, the legs will give way, and the feet, and then maybe the mind.”
Waiting for Godot, St James Theatre, June 30-July 2.