‘You are aware that this life doesn’t go on for ever,” Ian McKellen says, chewing an egg and tomato sandwich as he girds his loins for tonight’s performance. Behind him is an alcove large enough to contain a single bed, a clothes rack and a dressing table on which there is a handful of cards — this is, he says, a rare example of a West End dressing room being “what you expect a West End dressing room to be”. It is a reminder that our greatest theatrical knight has just turned 85. He spent the big day playing Falstaff in Player Kings, the director Robert Icke’s three-hour-plus condensation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I and Part II. What better way is there
INTERVIEW
Ian McKellen: ‘When a script arrives, I think this might be my last job’
Every role counts when you’re 85 — that’s why he is playing Falstaff for the first time. His next trick? Maybe Gandalf in a new Lord of the Rings film, ‘if I’m still alive’
The Times
