Sir Ian McKellen has rightly been acclaimed as the greatest living British stage actor with an unenviable track record of success and compelling performances. We have watched him many times over the years from the ground-breaking Bent in 1979 and sat on stage in the Olivier for his Coriolanus in 1984 through more recently to his utterly enthralling King Lear at the Duke of York and his extraordinary one-man show On Stage that toured the country. There can be no doubting his love of performance, his energy, and his desire to entertain and move audiences. So, it was with a great deal of anticipation that we booked to see him return to Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor on 'Freedom day', 19th July 2021.
Having been to several socially distanced indoor and outdoor shows over the last twelve months and enjoyed the extra space and reassurance of anti-Covid measures within the venues it came as something of an unpleasant shock to experience queuing to enter the venue for bag searches, queuing to have the tickets checked in the confined foyer space and a very full house (including an audience packed on the stage close to the performers) squeezed into the tight legroom of the Royal Stalls. And of course, that forgotten memory of those in the middle of the row being last to leave the bar before each act. Add to that the sweltering heat of the evening and one can’t help thinking we have the perfect condition for Jonathan Van Tam’s three C’s for Covid transmission. It was an added distraction to our enjoyment of the show, and one has to open that this production particularly with its 82-year-old star avoid the risk of closure that so many West End shows are suffering.
