(He's the one in a striped Gap-like shirt with blue jeans and pale blue quasi-Croc shoes that bring out his cornflower eyes).Most of you will know he's in Singapore on the first leg of the Royal Shakespeare Company's tour of "King Lear" and "The Seagull" (and very lucky we are too to have him; we're the only Asian city graced with his presence and we're meeting him before Melbourne and Wellington and New York and Minneapolis and San Francisco and bloody London). It's thanks to the initiative of Gaurav Kripalani at the Singapore Repertory Theatre, and while I do think their ticket prices are a bit insane, I do believe them when they say they're doing this at a net loss.
Anyway, I get invited to the press conference via Flying Inkpot, because editor Kenneth Kwok (who is a biiiig fan) has a day job, like most people. And I'm rather jetlagged from Australia, since I only touched down from Townsville the day before. And I've been informed via e-mail that Fridae will be doing a story too, they'll just want me to write the introductory blurb, thank you very much; everything else will be handled through a clinical e-mail interview.
But lo and behold, when I raise my arm to ask a simple question ("What's your proudest achievement in gay activism?") McKellen's so intrigued and insistent on making his case known about gay rights that he says he'll see me in an unscheduled one-on-one interview after the conference.
The resulting interview (which is much less thorough than an e-mail interview would have been, because I was on a tight deadline and had no recording devices) is posted here on Fridae.
And of course I had to wait about an hour for Reuters and everyone important to get through him, and then I had to hurry up or else I'd exhaust him before his tech, and there was some unhappiness because I'd wanted my friend Julianne from AFP to be able to sit in but SRT felt it might be best to keep the gay news exclusive to the gay rags and keep their image clean in front of the mainstream media. (It must be very trying for them to have as big a star as McKellen with them; he goes on live interviews on CNA and 95 FM and he does not stick to the script... see below:)
But my greatest joy was probably getting to tell Ian (lemme pretend we're on first name basis) that "King Lear" has a history of interpretation here: he was terribly interested in my description of Theatreworks's "Lear" in 1999 while a little confused by my hurried attempt to encapsulate Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia's "King Lear: The Avoidance of Love" in two sentences. I also let him know that "Happy Endings: Asian Boys Volume 3" was playing, in case he has any time to take in other shows.
Gaurav was very, very charitable in allowing me to keep him back and talk cock about other theatre companies like that - he even let Ian know about my musical "Georgette", though he gracefully forebore from mentioning whether it was any good. Ian was also wonderfully tickled by the fact that when great British actor John Gielgud came here in 1945 to play Hamlet for the Brits, ingaporeans were only allowed to watch if they were ushers.
Anyhow, I've promised him a copy of "SQ21" to be left at reception. (Ian said he'd try and get me comps, but I doubt it's possible - those are pretty damn expensive tickets - and anyway, with my persistent cough, I'd ruin the whole performance.)
And whaddayaknow; I'm not the only fagtivist jumping on him in these parts:
I could have asked for a photograph together with him, but it felt like that would have been too, too unprofessional. After all, I'll always have the journalistic document as proof of contact.
P.S. Kudos to Hong Xinyi of The Straits Times Life! for being the first to ask him about 377A.
P.P.S. My Indonesian maid Yuli saw him in the papers yesterday, in the costume and make-up of Sorin from "The Seagull". She laughed and said he looked like Saddam Hussein. WTF???
UPDATE: Ohmigod. He actually got me those comps. Two tickets. Good ones. For King Lear on Saturday night. The bad news was that I waited at the wrong exit for him and couldn't take him to Alfian's birthday party afterwards.
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