Train-spotter Shakespeare's brief encounter with fascism

THE withered arm and stoop may be familiar. But, forsooth, there's something a trifle unShakespearean about the uniform and swagger-stick.
For this is Richard the Third as you've never seen him before . . . arrayed in the awful majesty of the Third Reich.
Sir Ian McKellen, one of Britain's greatest actors, was seen last week giving his own interpretation of the Bard's deformed king in a new 7 1/2 million movie version being shot in Lancashire.
In the film, Richard is transformed from a medieval monarch to a 20th Century military dictator.
And the horse for which he was prepared to swap his kingdom is replaced by a steam locomotive.
Sir Ian was surrounded by troop trains, anti-aircraft guns, a Russian T-34 tank and a fleet of armoured vehicles.
A team of 200 crop-headed extras played his personal bodyguards, swapping tights and tunics for jackboots and SS combat smocks, swinging rifles and packing Schmeisser machine pistols.
And as Sir Ian strode across the sidings with his sinister black-shirted henchmen, Hollywood's Annette Bening - wrapped in furs as Shakespeare's widowed queen - cursed him for murdering her two little princes in the Tower. For Sir Ian, the project is the realisation of a three-year dream. His star-studded cast includes not only Ms Bening and Robert Downey Jr but Britain's Maggie Smith, Nigel Hawthorne and Adrian Dunbar.
And the train itself is something of a star. Originally built for the German railway in 1940, the 97-ton Pacific locomotive was bought by an enthusiast and shipped to Britain in the Sixties.

Carnforth, of course, is no stranger to film crews.
Fifty years ago it was the location for David Lean's romantic masterpiece Brief Encounter.
And if Sir Ian's Richard III goes down only half as well, his winter of discontent will be made glorious summer indeed.

Train-spotter Shakespeare's brief encounter with fascism - Mail on Sunday - 02/07/1995

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