Ian McKellen Departs Player Kings National Tour After Fall From Stage

Ian McKellen has withdrawn from the national tour of a Shakespearean production after falling off the stage during a performance. The veteran stage actor had been playing Falstaff in Player Kings, a production combining parts one and two of Shakespeare's Henry IV, adapted and directed by Robert Icke, at London's Noel Cöward Theatre.

Judging by the initial BBC report of the incident, McKellen lost his footing during Act 5, Scene 4 of Henry IV, Part One, in which Hal fights Hotspur at Shrewsbury. As the house lights came up, the actor cried out in pain and staff rushed to help, the BBC reported.

McKellen said in a statement, “Two weeks after my accident onstage, my injuries improve day by day. It’s with the greatest reluctance that I have accepted the medical advice to protect my full recovery by not working in the meantime.”

He added, “I had been so looking forward to bringing Player Kings to theatregoers in Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich and Newcastle."

In its review of the production, The Guardian praised McKellen’s "richly complex" portrayal. “His Falstaff is tragic almost from the start, all colour drained from his cheeks. He is not so much carnivalesque as carnival grotesque and a wheeler-dealer, wheezing and snorting, adenoidal and dyspeptic ­– a pub drunk and in soiled shirt and braces.”

Following the incident, it had been reported that McKellen was expected to make “a speedy and full recovery.”

In another piece for The Guardian, the actor David Weston, who understudied for McKellen's King Lear in 2007, wrote about McKellen’s “dread of disappointing his audience. No matter how tired he was or how ill he felt, Sir Ian was always there. He is of the old school of actors who pride themselves on never missing a performance. A vanishing breed.”

McKellen has said that he decided to become a professional actor in 1959 when he was involved in an undergraduate production of Henry IV at Cambridge University. “Ever since, the plays have been among my favourite Shakespeares, although through the years I've resisted offers to play John Falstaff,” he told the BBC. “Robert Icke's ingenious adaptation was irresistible.”