Gandalf Comes Home: Sir Ian McKellen Made an Honorary Citizen of Christchurch

Fourteen years after he first walked onto its stage, and more than a decade after he helped save it from the wrecking ball, Sir Ian McKellen has returned to the Isaac Theatre Royal. Christchurch has made him one of its own.

There is a particular kind of story that only New Zealand seems to produce. A British actor arrives to play a wizard in a film about a fictional country, falls in love with a real one, and then spends a decade quietly helping to rebuild a piece of it. That is roughly what happened here, and last week it came full circle.

At 87, McKellen returned to Christchurch under no obligation at all. No premiere, no press tour, no film to promote. He came because he wanted to see the theatre standing again.

What happened at the Isaac Theatre Royal

McKellen visited the restored theatre on Friday, performing for an invited audience of students, theatre staff, board members, donors, local artists and Christchurch City Council representatives. It was the first time he had stood on that stage since the building was brought back from earthquake ruin.

Acting Mayor Victoria Henstock presented him with his Honorary Citizenship, an honour reserved for people from outside Christchurch who have contributed something lasting to the life of the city. He was also formally appointed a Patron of the Isaac Theatre Royal.

He spoke about Waiting for Godot, the Samuel Beckett production that first brought him to the theatre in 2010, then performed two monologues: The Stranger's Case from Sir Thomas More and The Revels Speech from The Tempest. No wizard's staff. No Tengwar. Just an actor and a room.

The theatre gave him a pikorua, a twist pounamu pendant, a greenstone taonga symbolising friendship and enduring connection. Given the man's history with rings and pendants of a rather different sort, it is hard to imagine a better gift.

How Gandalf helped save a Christchurch theatre

To understand why a city would make an English actor an honorary citizen, you have to go back to February 2011.

The Canterbury earthquakes tore the heart out of central Christchurch. The Isaac Theatre Royal, an Edwardian building opened in 1908 and the last operational theatre of its kind in New Zealand, was badly damaged. Restoring it was going to be enormously expensive, and in a city full of urgent needs, a theatre is an easy thing to give up on.

The tour that raised $354,000

McKellen was in New Zealand in 2012 filming The Hobbit. Rather than spending his days off resting, he announced a one man show, Shakespeare, Tolkien and You, and took it around the country. Fifteen performances across eleven centres, from Stratford in Taranaki to Wanaka, Palmerston North, Tauranga, Hamilton and Carterton.

The tour brought in $354,000 in ticket sales, programme sales and donations, all of it going towards the theatre's rebuild. Just as importantly, it put international eyes on a restoration campaign that badly needed them. One of the theatre's Royal Boxes was permanently named the Sir Ian McKellen (Shakespeare) Box in his honour.

His reason for doing it was disarmingly simple: the Isaac Theatre Royal was the last theatre he had played in New Zealand, and he could see how much the people of Christchurch loved it.

The detail most reports left out: the ring made in Nelson

Buried in the coverage of that 2012 tour is a detail that Tolkien fans tend to seize on, and that most of the current news reports have skipped entirely.

Among the highlights of the trip, alongside being challenged to a duel by a seven year old wielding a toy Gandalf sword in Palmerston North and discovering a long lost cousin in Hawke's Bay, McKellen had a ring made for himself in Nelson. Not by a jeweller chosen at random. By the workshop that made the One Ring for the films.

That workshop belongs to Jens Hansen, a Danish born goldsmith who settled in Nelson and became one of the founding figures of modern New Zealand studio jewellery. In 1999 the art department of the film production company approached him directly and asked him to design a ring capable of carrying the weight of the story. What he produced was deliberately plain: a heavy, minimal band in gold, thicker through the shank than a conventional ring. That simplicity is exactly why it reads so powerfully on screen.

Jens Hansen died later that same year and never saw his ring in a cinema. His sons carried the work on from the same small Nelson workshop.

So when McKellen sat down at a bench in Nelson and worked on a ring of his own, he was doing something quietly perfect. The actor who carried Middle-earth on screen was making a piece of jewellery in the actual place where Middle-earth's most famous object was designed.

Why this story belongs to New Zealand

It is easy to think of Middle-earth as something Hollywood built. It was not. The films were shot here, the landscapes are real and you can drive to them, and a surprising amount of what ended up on screen was designed and made by New Zealanders in small workshops in small towns.

That is the thread running through this whole story. A theatre in Christchurch saved partly by an actor who came here to make a film. A ring designed in a Nelson side street that became the most recognisable piece of jewellery in cinema. A greenstone pendant given to a knight of the realm because a city decided he belonged to it.

Middle-earth is not a set. It is a country, and people live in it.

Wear a piece of Middle-earth, made where it was imagined

If this story has you thinking about the objects at the centre of it, these two pieces carry the same provenance as the story above. Both are made here, under licence, in the country the films made famous.

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