McKellen’s masterly Lear

The best way to get serious press coverage for your big show is to provoke the hacks by shutting them out from the first night. It’s a high-risk strategy but in the case of the now famous King Lear with Ian McKellen it’s worked a dream. The director Trevor Nunn and the RSC chief Michael Boyd took a fearful caning for slamming the door, but who were they to worry when the show was already sold out? They’re wily enough to know that good publicity has precious little to do with good reviews. If there wasn’t enough mileage in the sad story of the fall from her bike of Frances Barber (Goneril) which caused the closure, there was more than enough in Germaine Greer’s diatribe in the Guardian. Greer, who must have paid her way in, called down the wrath of heaven upon the RSC for its abuse of ‘the greatest metaphysical poem in the English language’, airing her shock and awe at the fleeting exposure of McKellen’s manhood during the storm.