Onstage nudity: let's grow up, not cover up

Ian McKellen: not grinning, but baring it in King Lear. Photograph: John D McHugh/AFP

When will audiences grow up and get over nudity on stage? Ian McKellen is playing the title role in the RSC's King Lear, now previewing in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the 67-year-old actor takes his clothes off during the storm scene. It's a move completely justified by the text. Lear says: "Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings! Come; unbutton here" - and Shakespeare's stage directions read "tearing off his clothes".

But the Independent reported that a number of spectators were "dismayed by the incident and said they had received no prior warning" that the staging contained full nudity. I would love to know who these people are and what kind of dainty world they live in. And I can't help wondering what they would have made of Lev Dodin's recent King Lear at the Barbican - a production very much about senility, and the running battle between children and parents - which featured not one but several ageing men jiggling their bits on stage.

A spokeswoman for the RSC has said that when the play officially opens on April 3 there will be warning notices in the foyer if the nudity, which is under discussion, is kept in. But should punters be babied in this way? I wonder whether the RSC's management will also be pointing out for those who haven't bumped into King Lear before that it features adultery, murder and eye-gouging? Or whether they will, in future, be posting signs informing audiences that Hamlet stabs an old man or that two horny teenagers get it on in Romeo and Juliet? Do warnings, somehow, make these things more palatable? These plays should disturb us - they are, after all, full-blooded tragedies. Shakespeare has always been more down-and-dirty than we perhaps like to think.

We are left with the consideration that some culturemongers are content to watch violence on stage, but cannot countenance a glimpse of pubic hair. The RSC met earlier this week to discuss whether parents and school groups should be warned about the content of King Lear. Isn't this just pandering to a Victorian primness about nudity? Sorry, but if children are old enough to understand the play, then they are old enough to see what people look like naked without going into shock.

As a child, I was taken to see the late, great Robert Stephens play Lear at Stratford. That's when I found out that a play could smash my heart to smithereens. I'm not sure whether Stephens took his clothes off, though I think Simon Russell Beale's Edgar may have done. What I remember is Stephens' big, blunt, stricken face and his sweet, baleful voice: they won me over to theatre.

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