Ahead of a new RSC production, the theatrical legend, Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans compare notes on playing Christopher Marlowe’s taboo-breaking king across three generations
In 1969, long before the era of intimacy co-ordinators, Ian McKellen kissed a succession of would-be co-stars for a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, to see who among them would be best to lock lips with. “I was thrilled to play a gay man,” McKellen recalls of the auditions to play the king’s favourite, Piers Gaveston. “The actor who got the part [James Laurenson] was straight, and he was a very good kisser.”….
This year McKellen, 85, has been mentoring another gay actor about to take on the role. Daniel Evans, the RSC’s co-artistic director, will play Edward II in Stratford-upon-Avon — where he anticipates audiences will be shocked by his staging of the king’s violent, apocryphal death: a red-hot poker inserted up the bum. Evans has also been taking advice from Simon Russell Beale, who played England’s first gay king for the RSC in 1990. “You don’t have to be gay to play Edward II,” McKellen says, laughing. “But it helps.”…
