It wouldn’t take a genius to conclude that 87-year-old Sir Ian McKellen was done with the stage. After an incredibly prolific start to his eighties, he fell off the Noël Coward Theatre stage during a performance of Robert Icke’s 2024 Henry IV mash-up Player Kings and seemed thereafter to be focussing on screen work. Well, as it happens you’ll be able to catch him in Avengers: Doomsday this winter… right about the same time he returns to the stage to lend his star power to the reopening season of the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick.
Not just for a show or two either. Lear is a new adaptation of King Lear, but also – it seems – McKellen’s life and thoughts, by playwright Simon Stephens, Yard boss Jay Miller, with contributions (naturally) from McKellen himself.
What is all this going to look like? Hard to say exactly but it’s probably going to be very cool indeed and sell out more or less instantly and it’ll star Ian McKellen – you’d be not in your perfect mind to miss out.
At time of writing the show was not on sale and precise dates and times were TBC.
