Size doesn’t matter, Sir Ian McKellen discovered on a visit to the City Theatre, in Durham. He tells Steve Pratt about the importance of the amateur stage in the country’s cultural life.

SIR IAN McKELLEN has barely set foot through the door of the theatre in the centre of Durham when he’s accosted by a man dressed as a bishop.

Understandably, he looks surprised.

He’s come to visit and view an amateur theatre and finds himself being given a history lecture by someone in cloak and mitre. He’s not a real clergyman, but a performer – Colin, I think he said his name was – welcoming McKellen to the City Theatre, a hidden gem located behind the market place.

One of our leading theatrical knights is here in the role of patron of the Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain, a network of theatres run by the amateur theatre companies that own them.

The bishop delivers a potted history of the region in a loud, booming voice (of which McKellen later says he’s envious). It is a long monologue (something also noted by the guest, although I don’t think he was criticising the length) that causes the pursuing press posse of cameramen and reporters to halt in an unruly bundle behind McKellen.

We must resemble a melle of hobbits and orcs in a scene from The Lord Of The Rings, the film trilogy in which McKellen so successfully inhabited the character of Gandalf the wizard.

McKellen has been in Darlington talking to students as part of a Stonewall anti-homophobic bullying campaign. He has deliberately excluded the media from that part of his offscreen work, he writes on his website, for fear their presence will inhibit those taking part.

He is, though, more than happy to talk about Little Theatres. In the pocket-size auditorium, accommodating an audience of only 71, he’s put on the stage – dressed for a forthcoming production of the Victorian thriller Gaslight – and set off on his promotional work.

McKellen hasn’t appeared in this particular play before, although the lines he speaks are off-the-cuff and not from any script. He conducts an interview on a mobile phone with Radio Tees while pacing the carpet.

The audience of City Theatre members gathered to welcome him applauds when he plugs their forthcoming show on air. He believes the City Theatre is the smallest of the guild’s Little Theatres. “I am here to support them and think amateur theatre is very important,” he says. “Commercial theatre wouldn’t be where it was if it wasn’t for these amateur theatres who beaver away and keep people going to the theatre.” More applause.

“I think every professional actor you’ve ever heard of probably started as an amateur, may have started with the Little Theatre Guild or at school or university. But we all do it for love in the first place, this is what amateur means and we go on in our hearts being amateur actors.”

What’s next for him is a week’s holiday in India. Then he flies from Delhi to Welly – Wellington, New Zealand – on February 21 to put on a pointy hat and long beard to reprise the role of Gandalf “for all the fans who want to see The Hobbit as much as they enjoyed The Lord Of The Rings”.

McKellen has a special interest in amateur theatre because as a child, in Lancashire, he did some of his first acting at Bolton Little Theatre, after being taken to see his first Shakespeare plays – Twelfth Night followed by Macbeth if he remembers correctly – by his sister when he was eight or nine.

“So, little theatre was a big part of my learning about the theatre, initially as the audience and then as an actor. I got into acting because I liked going to the theatre. Now 50 years later I am asked to become patron of the Little Theatre Guild.”

When made patron, he foolishly declared his intention of visiting them all without quite realising how many there were. He’s been to 15 or 16 theatres so far.

From Durham, he went to Sunderland to see a production of Macbeth at the Royalty Theatre.

He clearly doesn’t subscribe to the superstition that speaking the name of the Scottish play in a theatre is bad luck as he says it several times.

He enthuses about Newcastle Theatre Royal (“probably the greatest theatre in the country – it is for me, I’ve done so much work there”) but is rendered speechless on being told that the Royal Shakespeare Company won’t be touring to the North-East in 2011 for the first time since 1977.

“I am very upset and I am sure people in the North-East are too because it’s a national company.

They don’t belong to London or Stratford, they belong to us all.”

FILMING The Hobbit will occupy him on and off for the next two years but will allow him to tour in an unnamed play this summer – “we might even be coming this far North, I don’t know”.

He appreciates the role that amateur theatre has to play in the country’s cultural life. The people sitting patiently in the auditorium waiting to meet him, he points out, would tell me they enjoy putting on plays whether it’s directing, acting, deciding which one to do, serving in the bar or doing the costumes.

“It’s all fun and an awful lot of Brits feel the same,” he says. “People like putting on plays and then there are other people who like going to see them. So as long as the two meet, come together, everyone is happy.”

He tries to explain the need for theatre in the British psyche. Our culture is one of reticence, he says, we don’t easily express our emotions in public. “Well, not as easily as the Italians do – and we might note that the Italians, who are forever screaming and expressing themselves in public, don’t have any theatre. They don’t need it, they’ve got their own drama. Their idea of theatre has to be grand opera.

“Drama is their everyday life. We don’t have that release. It’s just a theory, maybe that’s why the British love theatre so much. These amateur companies and these little theatres express than national predilection towards stage drama.”

Told that a lot of people don’t know the City Theatre is there, he suggests it’s time they found out. “We’ll have to talk about that. Maybe it’s up to you gentleman to let them know its here,” he says turning to the press contingent.

Perhaps the bishop could be sent out around the city to spread the word.