In Mumbai recently to attend the "Shakespeare Lives on Film" festival organised to mark the 400th death anniversary of the Bard, Ian McKellen recounted his lifelong fascination with the English playwright. From Henry IV and Cymbeline during his Cambridge days to Macbeth and King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company, McKellen has dipped into Shakespeare on stage countless times. His performance in Richard III (1995) is a landmark of Shakespeare on film. And now he has come out with an app on which users can hear him read plays by the writer. Is there any part of McKellen's life untouched by Shakespeare?
Not if he can help it. The fascination has deep roots. "I first went to see a Shakespeare play when I was about eight or nine, by an amateur company where I lived in the north of England," McKellen told The Reel, a film website. "I went to other plays too, so Shakespeare just was part of theatre to me, and very enjoyable. When I came to study it at school, it didn't seem like a chore because I related it to the fun of going to see a play. I found myself acting in Shakespeare productions at school."
McKellen belongs to a long line of classically trained actors, from Dame Judi Dench to Geoffrey Kendal, bitten by the bug. One reason Shakespeare has stood the test of time is the dramatic appeal of his plays, not just the action between the pages but the sheer possibilities that open up in bringing him to the stage. Under the rubric "Shakespeare Lives", the British Council is celebrating all this year the Bard's legacy across a host of mediums-film and stage, yes, but also music, photography and painting.
Shakespeare Lives on Stage is a tribute to a writer whose influence surpasses location and time. In Bangladesh, the Graeae Theatre Company has been working with Dhaka Theatre since 2013 to create a long-term training programme with young disabled adults that culminated in a new production of Romeo and Juliet this year. The production was a huge success. In the US, Shakespeare Behind Bars is an ongoing project that help the incarcerated stage Shakespeare productions.
In recent years, the Bard's currency seems to have shifted from the stage to the screen. Both Hollywood and other film industries have either adapted Shakespeare's plays or made films with classic Shakespearean themes. Navel-gazing as an art form may have reached its peak, but it has roots going back to the classic soliloquies of Hamlet and King Lear. For, what is Christopher Nolan's Batman if not a Shakespearean study of the nature of evil and how he who battles it is as prone to its excesses as he who indulges it?
Back home, Vishal Bharadwaj has adapted Macbeth, Othello and, most recently, Hamlet, high accomplishments that situate the Bard in thoroughly Indian settings. In films whose titles retain the first letter of the original play, Bharadwaj brings Shakespeare to the ravines of Uttar Pradesh or to the snowy heartland of Kashmir, but the subterfuge and intrigue is as classically edge-of-the-knife as anything the playwright imagined in 16th-century England.
McKellen himself has benefitted, both professionally and personally, from the reptilian flexibility of the dramatist's work. In Acting Shakespeare, his travelling theatre of monologues, he devised a highly successful commingling of the literary and the anecdotal. The adaptation ran to packed houses from 1977 to 1990, introducing viewers to a bevy of Shakespearean characters and exploring how themes of emotional conflict such as envy, greed and lust make the texts richer.
While in India, McKellen also inaugurated the Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. McKellen, who is gay, has said that coming out made him a better actor, and that Shakespeare played a part in shaping his gay sensibility too. "There are many gay relationships in Shakespeare, it's just that people haven't really noticed," he has said in an interview.
"In The Merchant of Venice, the play about Shylock the Jew, the Merchant of Venice is actually not Shylock but the character called Antonio, who starts the play. His first line is, 'In sooth- in truth - I know not why I am so sad.' Well, we find out very quickly why he's sad, his boyfriend Bassanio, has just said, 'I'm going to get married, and will you lend me some money?' That's a gay situation, that's an older man and a younger man, and Antonio is happy to kill himself for the love of Bassanio. People have always thought it is a play about Jews. Yes it is, it's also a play about gays, and about slaves," McKellen explained.
Even as the literary arts battle the attention-evaporating onslaught of today's media, fans of the Bard can rest easy. With no dearth of interesting characters and complex storylines, the Bard of Avon will continue to reward artists scouting for fresh interpretations in his centuries-old work.
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