Sir Trevor Nunn talks to Viv Hardwick about his sell-out versions of King Lear and The Seagull which play Newcastle's Theatre Royal, as part of the RSC revamped season, from June 29th.

HAVING persuaded Sir Ian McKellen to make his debut as King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the idea of sharing the limelight with 36 other plays during the Complete Works season came as a shock for leading theatre and film director Sir Trevor Nunn.

But the man responsible for starting the RSC's annual visits to Newcastle in 1976 revealed how bringing the sell-out joint productions of Lear and The Seagull to Newcastle at the end of this month has become the Stratford-upon-Avon season's fitting finale.

And the road to McKellen's Lear dates back to the pair's friendship through acting at Cambridge University when Nunn was 19 and McKellen 20.

The head of the RSC until 1986 says: "We became very good friends and got involved in a number of projects together. Of course he always played big parts and I played rather smaller parts. I didn't get him to Stratford to work until 1976 having taken over the job here (artistic director) in 1968 but I finally lured him here and that was a pretty important year in that I also lured Judi Dench for the same season. But he also played Romeo quite wonderfully.

"I got him back to Stratford to do Iago in Othello and he had a fantastic success. I said then... 'if you're ever going to do King Lear will you pledge to do it with me' and he made that pledge. I had to remind him of that several times and it always amused me in recent years that his reply was 'I'm much too young'. But you think back and Paul Schofield was 44 when he played Lear at Stratford and you forget that it's a part normally played by relatively young men. Ian finally got in touch with me and said 'I think the moment's come' and therefore it just happened to coincide with the Complete Works season which I knew nothing of when I contacted RSC and said 'Ian wants to do King Lear in 2007'."

He calls the Complete Works a very thrilling project but jokes "being told you are one of 37 productions poured a little bit of cold water on our enthusiasm".

"Then it transpired that the best possible solution for Ian's dates and for the RSC was that it should be the final production of the Complete Works and what a fabulous year it has been for the RSC. Absolutely sensational, and if anyone was in any doubt about where the centre of World Shakespeare is there is no doubt now."

The man who successfully ran the National Theatre between 1997 and 2003 before moving on to a string of West End hits felt under no pressure - this being his third Lear as director - to create a radical version of the play. Nor did he find any difficulties working with McKellen.

His biggest challenge was the fact that some members of cast were Shakespeare veterans while others were total beginners but had to prepare for a world tour of Lear and The Seagull.

He says: "I was faced with that situation a number of times at the National (Theatre) and there is something very invigorating when everyone agrees to start at absolutely the same place and says 'what is an iambic pentameter?' "

He calls the first ever tour of Newcastle back in 1976 as "a fantastically heady period. When we started the 1976 season quite a large group of people had decided that they were going to stay with the RSC so there was a very good nucleus of actors." He feels McKellen, Dench and North-East actor John Woodvine ensured the RSC that year was rich in experience and skill. Six plays were staged in the main house at Stratford plus a full season at The Other Place - the RSC's smallest Stratford venue which is now part of the new Courtyard Theatre.

"By then I was feeling that the system of touring which we were bound to by The Arts Council was unsatisfactory. They wanted the big subsidised companies to tour to the big old opera houses and old variety theatres. The difficulty for us is that we weren't able to take our identity with us and often we were asked to tour to these places for just a week. So therefore you were visiting a place but building no relationship, no continuity or sense that there was any meaning in the visit. I took to the Arts Council the dream of finding a centre in the North of England to take the entire season of productions. In addition I proposed a small-scale touring company we should be able to develop for ourselves a touring stage and lighting rig to be able to take all around the country, particularly to places that didn't have theatres."

Nunn said that he and colleagues put a finger on the map and said 'wouldn't it be great if it was Newcastle because then we've got a tremendous centre of population and should be able to draw an audience from as far afield as Edinburgh, Carlisle and Leeds'. "Indeed we discovered we were getting people from Denmark and Sweden and Norway. There we were at the Theatre Royal, which is sensational, and the actors always used to say 'at last, a theatre that you can really communicate in'," Nunn says.

But he refused to be drawn on the change of RSC policy with "the season" being amended to one-week touring while Stratford's RST is redeveloped over the next four years. McKellen led out the first regional touring company the following year which has also lasted 30 years until being cut back recently.

"I don't know what the circumstances are, I don't know what the finances are. You must understand that I'm looking back on a time when I ran the company... they were great days."

* King Lear runs in repertoire with The Seagull at Newcastle's Theatre Royal, June 29-July 7. For details of returned tickets ring 0870-905-5060.