Ian McKellen is to play King Lear in his first major theatrical role since falling from the stage into the first row of the audience in 2024.
The accident, which left him with “agonising pains”, happened during a performance of Player Kings in the West End and led McKellen to withdraw from the production. He will now return as Shakespeare’s Lear – a character he played to great acclaim in 2007 and 2017 – in the opening season of the redeveloped Yard theatre in east London, known for its DIY spirit and adventurous experimental work with emerging artists.
It is a huge coup for the Yard, which has always punched above its weight since it was set up as a temporary theatre in a disused warehouse in Hackney Wick in 2011. Last month, it won an Olivier award for The Glass Menagerie, the swansong production in its original home before it was razed and rebuilt. The theatre’s new curved auditorium, on the same site, doubles the size of the audience but McKellen’s Lear will be an especially hot ticket as this remains an intimate venue – it has just 220 seats. The Yard’s founder and artistic director Jay Miller will stage Lear, a “reimagining” developed over the last year with playwright Simon Stephens, and said it would be “a beautiful show about what it means to be a king but also about loss, memory and what it is to give a life to the theatre which is what Ian has done”.
Miller described McKellen, who will turn 87 this month, as “one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met”. He added: “His ideas for theatre are extraordinary. At the age of 86 he’s restlessly still trying to figure out what it can do. His knowledge of Shakespeare and what it means to people is really important to me – he doesn’t try to intellectualise it, it doesn’t become an academic exercise.” Instead, said Miller, the actor asks: “How can we make it really land so people will have an evening that 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 took on the main role in a 2007 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company that transferred to the West End, toured the world and was filmed for television. Ten years later he was Lear once more, in a Chichester version that also went into the West End.
Miller said that Shakespeare’s characters have “become mythic figures for our culture” and that actors of McKellen’s “calibre and genius” realise that they’ll “never finish the job … Acting is something that you’ll never perfect, you just keep on trying to find new things about who we are.”
On Friday, McKellen’s new film The Christophers – in which he plays a painter – will be released in cinemas. (It co-stars Michaela Coel whose play Chewing Gum Dreams was an early success for the Yard and launched Coel’s career.) Next year McKellen will be seen again in another of his best known roles, Gandalf, in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. He has not been entirely absent from the stage since the Player Kings accident. In January he gave a rehearsed reading of Equinox, a new monologue by Laurie Slade, at Pitlochry Festival theatre in Scotland and also appeared that month – this time in video form – in the experimental, mixed-reality play An Ark, put on at the Shed in New York. That play was also written by Simon Stephens.
To be staged this winter, Lear is one of six productions in the Yard’s new season. There will be a 50th anniversary production in September of Ntozake Shange’s “choreo-poem” for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, directed by Diane Page with music composed by Jammz. Miller called it “one of those plays that should be in our theatrical canon but isn’t” and said that Shange, who died in 2018, “should be up there with the Sarah Kanes, the Caryl Churchills”.
Over summer, the Yard is hosting the London premiere of Malmö Stadsteater’s puppet production The World Is Full of Married Men, which brings to life the 1968 debut novel of Jackie Collins using “adapted Barbie dolls”. It has been, says Miller, “a smash hit in Stockholm” and is “sexy, irreverent and funny”, adding that Collins “was way ahead of her time in terms of the feminism she was standing by”. Translated from Swedish by Lulu Raczka, it unfolds against a landscape of the 60s media industry in London “that doesn’t feel that far away”.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway has been adapted by Holly Robinson for a production to 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 we’re in control of them or not”. Opening in January, the new play There’s Something About Adam Black – written by Troy Hunter and directed by Tatenda Shamiso – is a “hilarious” romcom about two Black gay men. “We’ve been working with Troy for five years – I think he’s going to be a star,” said Miller.
The season also includes the previously announced Philosophy of the World, a show by the company In Bed With My Brother that tells the story of cult rockers the Shaggs, once dubbed “the best worst band of all time”. A hit at last summer’s Edinburgh fringe, it was originally developed at the Yard in 2024. “We’re a key engine room for art and culture in London and beyond,” said Miller. “We’re still really excited about what the potential of theatre can be.” Tickets for every production start at £10.
Designed by Takero Shimazaki Architects, the new Yard has an improved eco footprint and will bear “the influence of what was there before but pretty much 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 – with some showers!”