Ian McKellen: marquee star in a minor-key role. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Last weekend, I took my fiancée (doncha know) to Warwickshire for a birthday break: hotel, beauty treatment, that kind of thing. Oh yes, I thought we'd take in a play at Stratford too. Give us something to talk about besides the goddamn wedding.
Anyway, it was a toss up between one of this country's greatest stage actors in Lear, and the same actor - Ian McKellen - in The Seagull. And since Lear didn't catch Shakespeare at his sunniest, what with the birthday spirit and everything, I plumped for Chekhov's "comedy with a landscape", as the great Russian playwright branded his desolate study of writing, fate and suicide.
The only thing was that Sir Ian didn't in fact appear that night. The part of Sorin was played instead by William Gaunt, an extremely able actor whom I last saw as Arthur Birling in An Inspector Calls and who appears, at the sprightly age of 70, to be making his RSC debut. And a good thing too, I came to think, once I settled down to the news that neither McKellen nor in fact Frances Barber, scheduled to play Arkadina, would be gracing Stratford's new Courtyard theatre with their potentially overbearing presence.
Now I'd be interested to hear from others who may have seen McKellen doing his turn as Sorin, but for my part I was glad I'd screwed up the schedules. I can see McKellen handling the character's soft-handed bonhomie just about OK, but Sorin is a part intended to embody the spiritual and physical decay at the drama's heart. He is supposed to do nothing but mark the passing of time through a series of feeble regrets and stifled half-actions conceived in gentle, ineffectual defiance against humdrum foreclosure and the power of writing to shape and destroy lives. But if the actor playing Sorin was such that you kept expecting the character suddenly to re-appear in gleaming white, spluttering something about "Morrrdorr" and generally saving the world, it would be difficult to salvage the play's fragile atmosphere.
McKellen's recent cinematic history aside, however, it struck me that Chekhov's plays are all unsuited to big star roles, to actors who steal the limelight and dominate the stage. Chekhov's characters are much more like real people in that sense, carving a gentler existence for themselves amongst the nexus of reactions and actions of other characters in the socially complex, twilit worlds their author constructs for them. You need actors who reflect the audience's gaze out to the drama around them, rather than gather it up for themselves, zealously controlling access to a play's emotional centre.
McKellen as Lear, though, I can imagine being perfect - like a jealous, wizened spectre of his magnificent Richard III. Both are parts where the character provides the lens through which the plays should be seen, and demand a certain strength and charisma in their actors. But the next time I see a stage legend lining up for Chekhov, and perhaps Ibsen too, I rather think I'll shy away.
Not that the critics have been much help with the current RSC run, since Trevor Nunn seems to have banned them from both Lear and The Seagull until yesterday afternoon, 10 weeks in. I may well be wrong, though: some Chekhov parts, such as Ranyevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, might repay some stellar investment.
But I wonder how the critics, presumably already rather grumpy over their long exclusion, found the spectacle of Gandalf in Melikhovo?
