Paranoid as Pope

"It's marvelous to hear an audience listening," says Alec McCowen. He heard that rapt and magic silence for seven months in the triumphant London production of Hadrian VII (TIME, May 31, 1968). Now he is hearing it again in Manhattan, where Hadrian opened last week to critical bravos that echoed those back home. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic have called McCowen's performance one of the major theatrical events of the decade.

The play itself provides a perfect vehicle for his skills. Hadrian is a deft dramatization by Peter Luke of fantasy and fact in the life of Frederick William Rolfe, who died in 1913 at the age of 53 and was, to put it simply, as mad as a hatter. He disgraced himself at Oxford by going to a fancy dress ball as a raven and voiding a pint of whitewash from his tail in front of the Prince of Wales. He converted to Roman Catholicism and, in pursuit of holy orders, got himself expelled from two different seminaries for "lack of vocation." He then assumed the bogus title Baron Corvo and tried his loser's hand at painting, photography, journalism and schoolteaching -- ending his days in Venice as a mincing homosexual with a monumental case of paranoia.

His legacy to the world was a strange, convoluted novel called Hadrian the Seventh, in which the frustrated priest developed a fantasy of being called first to the cloth and then to the Throne of St. Peter -- becoming the second English Pope in history.

Narcissism and Vulnerability. Luke's play skillfully brackets Rolfe as Pope with two scenes in which Rolfe is shown in ignominious penury -- freezing and starving in his London room, bullied by his landlady, harassed by bailiffs, spitting vitriol at the obdurate world. Rolfe's real life was a dramatic contrast to the Vatican splendor of his Cinderella dream, and McCowen makes the most of it. Head cocked and shoulders hunched into a grubby purple scarf, he alternately whines with self-pity and whirls arrogantly on his persecutors, slashingly vituperative.

As Rolfe playing Pope, McCowen basks deliciously in all the power and glory: swishing his stunning robes with epicene pleasure, outwitting a cluster of conniving cardinals or charming his opponents into loyalty and love, reforming the Church singlehanded in a series of staggering coups, then meeting his martyrdom, complete with saintly forgiveness of the murderer. McCowen does all this with a command of technique that is outstanding. His ability to project emotional confusion -- notably in two dramatic confession scenes --while maintaining crystalline intelligibility, is a paradigm of the elegant best in English acting style. Beyond that, he manages to evoke for Rolfe a sense of pity and affection.

Caught in a Dog Collar. "Perhaps I play him more sympathetically than he is," says McCowen. "I love the man very much." This kind of commitment to a character, McCowen feels, is the specialty of American acting, by which he considers himself strongly influenced. "American actors," he says, "may be sometimes lacking in technique, but they are never superficial. I think American theater has been a good influence on the English--more than they will admit. I found from the Americans that there was a great deal more to my job than I had realized."

McCowen began studying for his job early. At 16, he left school in Tunbridge Wells and joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art--psychologically buttressed by a preacher and a politician for grandparents and an ex-dancer for a mother. That was quite a while ago (he is now 43), and he has worked steadily and well during the years between, earning a mounting reputation among the theatrical cognoscenti. But his slight stature and light voice have kept him from the commanding leads that build an actor's public following. By coincidence, he has been cast four times recently as a man of God: a cardinal in The Agony and the Ecstasy, the young Jesuit in the London production of The Deputy, the title role in the BBC version of John Osborne's Luther, and the sinister Henderson who proclaimed himself God in After the Rain. "Eventually I must get out of that dog collar," he says.

Though he would have liked to round out a full year of Hadrian in London, McCowen was delighted with the producers' decision to bring him to Broadway before the season was over. "I love working in New York," he says. "There's so much more excitement about the theater here. You feel that you're in a slightly more important profession than you do in London, where it's all so much a matter of course."

For the quiet, almost self-deprecating bachelor, there was never anything matter-of-course about Hadrian VII. After all, it brought him popular success after 26 years of work, critical raves and the London critics' Best Actor Award, plus an actor's dream of a part. Says McCowen: "What more could an actor want than to sit on a throne stage center, dressed in white, with everyone kissing his hand?"

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