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Ian McKellen is set to play King Lear in his first stage performance since falling from the stage to the first row of the audience in 2024.
The accident, which left him with “painful pain”, it happened during the game of Kings Players in the West End and led McKellen to leave the production. He will now return as Shakespeare’s Lear – a character he loved in 2007 and 2017 – in a revamped opening season. Yard Theatre east London, known for its DIY spirit and experimental work by emerging artists.
It’s a huge Yard scheme, which has been punching above its weight since it was established as a temporary space in a warehouse in Hackney Wick in 2011. won an Olivier award for The Glass Menagerie, making a swansong in its original home before it was destroyed and rebuilt. The theatre’s new curved auditorium, on the same site, doubles the audience capacity but McKellen’s Lear will be the hot ticket as this is still an intimate venue – it only has 220 seats. Yard founder and artistic director Jay Miller will produce Lear, a “re-imagining” of last year’s play by playwright Simon Stephens, and said it would be “a beautiful show about what it means to be king and about loss, memory and what gives life to the theater that is what Ian has done”.
Miller described McKellen, who turns 87 this month, as “one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met”. He added: “His thinking about theater is unusual. At 86, he’s still trying to figure out what to do. Instead, Miller said, the actor is asking: ‘How can we make it so that people have an evening they’ll never forget?’
McKellen played Edgar opposite Robert Eddison’s Lear in 1974 and Kent opposite Brian Cox’s Lear in 1990. He first played the lead role in production 2007 for the Royal Shakespeare Company which moved to the West End, toured the world and was filmed for TV. Ten years later he was Lear once more, in the Chichester version which also went to the West End.
Miller said that Shakespeare’s characters “have become the legends of our culture” and that actors of McKellen’s “caliber and genius” realize that they “will never finish a job… Acting is something you can’t do well, you’re just trying to find new things about who we are.”
Friday, McKellen’s new film The Christophers – in which he plays an artist – will be released in the movies. (They are friends with Michaela Coel whose play Chewing Gum Dreams was an early hit at Yard and launched Coel’s career.) Next year McKellen will appear again in another famous role, Gandalf, in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. He has not been on the pitch since the Player Kings accident. In January he read it again and again Equinoxthe new monologue of Laurie Slade, at the Pitlochry Festival Theater in Scotland and appeared again that month – this time in the form of a video – in an experimental, mixed play. Arkwas placed in the Shed in New York. The play was also written by Simon Stephens.
To be shown this winter, Lear is one of six products released in the Yard’s new season. In September there will be Ntozake Shange’s “choreo-poetry” about black girls who decide to kill themselves / when the rainbow is enough, directed by Diane Page and music by Jammz. Miller called it “one of those plays that should be on our theater list but isn’t” and said Shange, who died in 2018, “should be up there with the Sarah Kanes, the Caryl Churchills”.
In the summer, the Yard hosts London’s Malmö Stadsteater puppet show The World Is Full of Married Men, which brings to life the 1968 play. the first book about Jackie Collins using “modified Barbie dolls”. It has been, says Miller, “a huge hit in Stockholm” and is “promiscuous, irreverent and funny”, adding that Collins was “ahead of her time in terms of the feminism she represented”. Translated from Swedish by Lulu Raczka, it appears against the backdrop of the 60s media industry in London “which doesn’t feel very far away”.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway has been adapted by Holly Robinson for a musical that will be directed next year by Anna Himali Howard. Miller said it would ask “big questions about the choices we make in our lives and whether or not we are in control of them”. Opening in January, the new drama There’s Something About Adam Black – written by Troy Hunter and directed by Tatenda Shamiso – is an “exciting romcom” about two Black men. “We’ve been working with Troy for five years — I think he’s going to be a star,” Miller said.
The season also includes the previously announced Philosophy of the World, the company’s In Bed With My Brother show that tells the story of cult rockers The Shaggs, who have been called “the best band of all time”. Hitting the edge of Edinburgh last summerwas originally designed at the Yard in 2024. “We are a hub for art and culture in London and beyond,” said Miller. “We’re still very excited about the potential of the theater.” All-round tickets start at £10.
Made up Takero Shimazaki ArchitectsThe new yard has an eco-friendly design and will have “the influence of the past but everything is new”, said Miller. “We have a dedicated studio now for our work with young people, an office for the first time and dressing rooms for the first time – and bathrooms!”
