For six decades, Sir Ian McKellen has inhabited virtually every major male role in the Shakespearean canon – Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Prospero. He has played them on the RSC’s stages, in the West End, on Broadway, and in cinemas worldwide. Yet one character remained conspicuously absent from his repertoire: Sir John Falstaff, the corpulent, conniving, heartbreakingly human knight who haunts the pages of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. In the spring of 2024, at the age of 85, McKellen finally accepted the assignment. The result, Robert Icke’s Player Kings at the Noël Coward Theatre, is not merely a triumph of casting – it is a revelation about what Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation can become when placed in the hands of a master who has spent a lifetime understanding what he is not.
The Role He Always Said No To
When Gregory Doran asked McKellen to play Falstaff for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2014, the actor refused. “I told Greg the role was too difficult,” McKellen told The Telegraph, “and I wasn’t sure whether putting on a fat suit would make me feel foolish.” Speaking to the BBC before Player Kings opened, he elaborated: “Actors who have taken on the role say it is verbally very challenging – it seems that the role was written for a particular actor and comedian in Shakespeare’s time, so it’s a bit like being given a script for Michael McIntyre.” McKellen acknowledged that he had always been “never attracted to” the character.
The turning point came when Robert Icke approached him with a vision that reframed the entire enterprise. “Rob Icke spoke to me very clearly about what he thought the part was like,” McKellen told The Bath Magazine. “He kept saying that this is a character out of The Sopranos.” Icke saw Falstaff not as a lovable rogue but as a dangerous, unpredictable figure – “someone who was not just jolly, but dangerous – you couldn’t quite be certain what he was going to do next.” McKellen added: “He turned Falstaff into a believable character rather than an exaggeration.”
It was, by McKellen’s own admission, the right approach at the right time. “I was right to be doubtful because it’s a very difficult part,” he said. “The late great Michael Gambon said to me, ‘Ah, I didn’t understand a word,’ so I’m not alone in thinking it’s a tricky part.”
A Sopranos Falstaff for a Divided Age
Icke’s adaptation, which fuses both parts of Henry IV into a single three-hour-and-forty-minute epic, strips the history plays of their period cosiness and plants them firmly in a recognisable contemporary landscape. The set, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, features towering brick walls and split-stage conference calls between Westminster and rebel-held Northumberland. Sound designer Gareth Fry punctuates scenes of tavern hedonism with drum’n’bass. Our first glimpse of Prince Hal (Toheeb Jimoh) is as a target for paparazzi, escaping into a dive bar to snort cocaine off a man’s back.
Within this world, McKellen’s Falstaff is a wheezing, adenoidal, wheeler-dealer in soiled shirt and braces – more carnival grotesque than carnival king. “His Falstaff is tragic almost from the start, all colour drained from his cheeks,” wrote Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, praising the performance’s “centripetal force.” Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out called McKellen “naturally excellent as an atypically elderly Falstaff, whose continual self-aggrandisement is such that even his line about being in his fifties comes across as an improbable boast.”
What distinguishes this Falstaff from its predecessors is its refusal of sentimentality. As Variety‘s David Benedict observed, McKellen plays “a decaying swagger, a sweating, corpulent record of a life dedicated to indulgence at the expense – and cost – of others.” The performance is “predictably mesmerizing but it’s a long way from the traditional endearing rascal.” McKellen makes “Discretion is the better part of valour” a cynical mission statement, and he does not hesitate to wrench a ring from a corpse’s finger.
The Young Prince Who Held His Own
If Player Kings belongs to McKellen in terms of sheer gravitational pull, its dramatic engine is the relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal – the surrogate father and the prodigal son whose coming-of-age story connects the two plays. Here, Icke made a crucial casting choice: Toheeb Jimoh, then best known as Sam Obisanya in Ted Lasso, was cast as Hal. The decision paid extraordinary dividends.
“To share a stage for most of three hours with Sir Ian McKellen and come off as his equal is no easy task for a young performer,” wrote Jim Compton-Hall in The Upcoming. “But Jimoh’s Hal is sensational, to the point that the biggest tragedy of Player Kings is that it isn’t five hours plus long to include Henry V.” Lukowski called Jimoh “fabulous,” noting that he “feels startlingly a piece with the vengeful older version of himself we meet in Henry V.”
Fiona Mountford of i noted that Jimoh brings “a brilliant energy to Hal, full of a kind of whirling recklessness as he spends his days drinking in the Boar’s Head with his mates. Then his easy presence, his lack of care, hardens as the play goes on. When he’s made king, suddenly his shoulders hunch, he’s awkward in his own skin. It’s amazing to watch.” Richard Coyle’s King Henry IV, “visibly buckling under the weight of majesty,” completes the triangle of competing father figures.
A Falstaff Forged in Cambridge, Finished at Eighty-Five
The roots of McKellen’s Falstaff reach back further than he might care to admit. At Cambridge, while studying English literature at St Catharine’s College, the 19-year-old McKellen played Justice Shallow in a student production of Henry IV – with his fellow undergraduate Derek Jacobi as Prince Hal. It was 1961; he would soon join Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company at the Old Vic. Sixty-three years later, he was still circling the play that had first drawn him to the stage.
McKellen has been performing Shakespeare professionally since his debut at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in 1961. His record is staggering: five Olivier Awards, a Tony Award for Amadeus, two Academy Award nominations, and a body of stage work that includes landmark productions of Richard III (RSC, 1990), King Lear (RSC, 2008, and Chichester, 2017), and an octogenarian Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor in 2021. “Shakespeare is what I’ve been doing for so long now,” he told The Telegraph, “it confirms I’m still alive.”
Yet Player Kings may be his most personal Shakespearean statement. “When a script arrives, I think this might be my last job,” he told The Times in June 2024. “At 85, planning too far ahead is a little bit foolhardy.” He described Falstaff as “a tragic comic character” and said of the rehearsal process: “I feel that I have been inside Falstaff when I’ve been rehearsing but I haven’t quite let him take me over yet. You always hope that by the last performance you’ve got it as right as you possibly can.”
An Abrupt Curtain Call – and a Promise to Return
The production’s West End run was cut short by a dramatic incident on 17 June 2024, when McKellen lost his footing during a fight scene and fell from the front of the Noël Coward Theatre’s stage. He cried out in pain and was assisted by staff and two doctors in the audience before being taken to hospital. Three performances were cancelled. Understudy David Semark completed the final West End shows and the subsequent UK tour – Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich, and Newcastle – in McKellen’s absence.
McKellen’s response was characteristically gracious. “My injuries have been diagnosed and treated by a series of experts, specialists and nurses working for the National Health Service,” he said via X. “They have assured me that my recovery will be complete and speedy and I am looking forward to returning to work.” In September, speaking to Reuters while promoting his film The Critic, he confirmed his desire to revisit the role: “I think I’ve come to realise that the best thing would be to go back and play the part again. Try and get better in the part and then finish and say, well, I played Falstaff well, rather than ‘I fell off the stage one night and I couldn’t finish it’.”
The Enduring Lesson of Player Kings
What Player Kings ultimately demonstrates is not merely that Ian McKellen remains a formidable stage actor – that has never been in question – but that Shakespeare’s characters continue to reveal new dimensions when approached without reverence. Icke’s refusal to treat Falstaff as a cuddly comic turn, and McKellen’s willingness to let the character’s danger and self-deception sit alongside his humour, produced a Falstaff that felt startlingly alive. The production reminded London audiences that live theatre, at its best, can do what no screen adaptation quite manages: hold a mirror up to a character four centuries old and find a face they recognise.
As McKellen told The Bath Magazine: “Academics often write about Falstaff; they are very intrigued by him, and through the generations Falstaff has been a huge success with audiences – he’s part of the culture really.” In 2024, at 85, he proved that part of the culture still has something urgent to say.
