Role marks a major return for the actor after falling off the stage in 2024 and is a coup for the forward-thinking theatre
Ian McKellen is to play King Lear in his first major theatrical role since falling from the stage into the first row of the audience in 2024.
The accident, which left him with “agonising pains”, happened during a performance of Player Kings in the West End and led McKellen to withdraw from the production. He will now return as Shakespeare’s Lear – a character he played to great acclaim in 2007 and 2017 – in the opening season of the redeveloped Yard theatre in east London, known for its DIY spirit and adventurous experimental work with emerging artists.
It is a huge coup for the Yard, which has always punched above its weight since it was set up as a temporary theatre in a disused warehouse in Hackney Wick in 2011. Last month, it won an Olivier award for The Glass Menagerie, the swansong production in its original home before it was razed and rebuilt. The theatre’s new curved auditorium, on the same site, doubles the size of the audience but McKellen’s Lear will be an especially hot ticket as this remains an intimate venue – it has just 220 seats. The Yard’s founder and artistic director Jay Miller will stage Lear, a “reimagining” developed over the last year with playwright Simon Stephens, and said it would be “a beautiful show about what it means to be a king but also about loss, memory and what it is to give a life to the theatre which is what Ian has done”.
