t first it seems preposterous. Aged 81, Ian McKellen has announced he is to play Hamlet. Who knows what age he will be when Sean Mathias’ production is finally able to open at the Theatre Royal Windsor? We think we know how old Hamlet is at the end of Shakespeare’s play. The not altogether reliable gravedigger says that the prince is 30. Which makes him a year younger than McKellen was when he opened in the part at Nottingham Playhouse, wearing a fringed leather jerkin, alongside a psychedelic ghost. Of the twin Shakespearean peaks, he is now much nearer the summit approached by an actor late in life: he has played King Lear three times. The first obvious question is : what happens to everyone else ? Will Gertrude be played by someone who could be 105? Will her romps in an enseamèd bed seem plausible ? Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern going to be jowly, or was Hamlet an exceptionally mature student ? Is Ophelia going to be older than usual ? If not, is her romance with the prince going to look creepy, or should it be thought of as another variation on the play’s father-child theme? There have been comprehensive ageings-up of Shakespeare plays. In 2010 a provocative version of Romeo and Juliet cleverly placed the action in a care home for the elderly. Three years later a calamitous production of Much Ado about Nothing starred James Earl Jones (82) and Vanessa Redgrave (76). However, Matthias does not seem to be aiming at an all-out geronto interpretation. So to what extent should McKellen seem to be young ? To what extent is that possible? The terrible weight that hangs over a Hamlet is the obligation to be the prince for a new generation. We want this play to be continually renewed. Which has meant some celebrated youthful Hamlets: David Warner (24), in 1965, with his trailing scarf; Ben Whishaw (23) in 2004, mooching through clouds of adolescent despair. These actors, in theory slightly underage for the part, could make Hamlet’s melancholies, frenzies and friskiness look like the essential attributes of adolescence. Yet no one thinks that ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’, or ‘to be or not to be’ are speeches fuelled by growing pains or teenage tantrums – or surely that audiences can only recognise feelings in someone exactly like themselves? One of the most outstanding Hamlets I have ever seen was Simon Russell Beale’s, performed when he was coming up to 40: he irradiated the part – and was plonkingly attacked by an American reviewer for looking insufficiently royal. Obviously there cannot be clashes between text and appearance. Decades later I still blush for the student production of Macbeth in which fresh-faced witches simpered in silk gowns while being told they were ‘withered’ and ‘wild’. I think Mathias and McKellen can avoid such a clash. A mighty actor such as McKellen can steal away our sense of the flesh we are looking at, by subtlety of interpretation, agility of verse speaking, quickness of movement, the lift and the sinking of a voice. He is capable of suggesting swiftness and vigour, though he is not likely to start imitating a 30-year-old, hopping around like a pixie - any more than the wonderful women actors in the all-female Shakespeares at the Donmar strode around in their male roles, pretending to be chaps. In almost every Shakespeare production some lines come into focus for the first time. This casting may prove fruitful in unexpected ways, throwing up phrases that are not usually highlighted : looking through the text before writing this I found : ‘they say an old man is twice a child’. There is even a handy speech which seems to validate the whole enterprise. Claudius warns Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that they will find their old friend utterly changed : ‘nor th’exterior nor the inward man resembles that it was.’ So perhaps the Prince has suffered a coup de vieux ? It is a risk but my hope is that this production tests the elasticity of the play and in doing so expands the sympathy of its audience. In a rigidly literal-minded age, when empathy is rapidly diminishing, we surely stand in sore need of such leaps of the imagination ?