Class of a Very Classy Field

By JAY COCKS

Britain's McKellen scores on Broadway, cementing a reputation

"I've found the man who killed Mozart." Ian McKellen whispered. He stared at a small man sitting near him in a New York City Italian restaurant. The man had a hard, beaked face. He wore a dark silk suit and deep gray shirt, and he looked altogether like a crow who had just come back from a health farm. He hunched over his food and held his hands over his plate in an inverted V, letting his fork dangle from his fingers like the clapper inside a bell.

It took McKellen perhaps ten seconds to absorb all this. It took him an additional five seconds to reproduce it and just an instant more to top it. He curled his mouth so it looked like a squeezed citrus. His eyelids shut down like blinds, into a squint, his hands shriveled into a kind of angular cupped shape, somewhere between a claw and a crotch, and he started throwing off lines from Amadeus. He became, in almost supersonic succession, the man at the neighboring table, then the character he has been playing in Peter Shaffer's smash Broadway play and, finally, some wonderfully stylized hybrid of them both. Then, suddenly, McKellen laughed and turned back to his meal. It was a day off, after all.

During working hours, McKellen can be found deploying this same unique combination of high art, low cunning and surreptitious showmanship. His incarnation of Play wright Shaffer's antagonist, Antonio Salieri, owes much to the offhand technical virtuosity McKellen displayed in that restaurant and even more to an analytic actor's intelligence that is restless and ruth less at once. "If I couldn't defend a performance intellectually, I'd be very un happy indeed," McKellen remarks, and his Salieri is a seamless reconciliation of paradox. It is a portrait in depth of a shallow man, a forgotten 18th century court composer so bedeviled by jealousy, the shock of his own mediocrity and the daunting genius of his principal rival that he encouraged Mozart's ruination and hastened his death. Full of wit and passion and measured extravagance, the performance has become perhaps the most warmly admired of the Broadway season.

It has also, for U.S. audiences, been one of the more surprising. Althought McKellen, 41, is regarded on home ground in England as the pre-eminent stage actor of his generation, the class of a very classy field, he has been on Broadway only once before, in a short-lived Russian play staged in 1967. By the harsh standards of Broadway, McKellen before Amadeus was less a reality than a reputation. Even now he receives no applause of respectful recognition when he starts to speak in the first act. But when he reappears for the start of the second, the applause sounds like a curtain call. And when the curtain call itself finally comes, it is a clear ovation.

"I would put Ian up with Olivier and Gielgud in his intelligence and skill," says the National Theater's Peter Hall, who directed Amadeus. "He's an original," says Trevor Nunn of the Royal Shakespeare Company. "He has a strong and complex intelligence, and he can't really be compared with anybody." Although he has the stature and the command of theatrical grandeur associated with the Olivier generation, McKellen also has something more contemporary, more recognizably his own. It is a sort of granite center, a moral core that harks back to his Cambridge teacher, the great critic F.R. Leavis, and that is regenerated by the actor's continual insistence that his work is "a social career. Leavis taught that you can judge whether a work is good in part by the moral stand it takes. I just can't conceive of a theater that isn't dedicated to improving society."

McKellen, who comes from "a comfortable, comforting, loving family" in Britain's industrial North, departed Cambridge with a penchant for theatrical excess that earned him quick notice and a few severe warnings. One reviewer called him "a show-off," and McKellen took the criticism to heart. He started his own troupe, the Actors' Company, in part to counter this "tendency to act in an overly individual way." Later he accepted Nunn's repeated invitations to join the R.S.C., where he further modulated his gifts and moderated his flamboyance. Says Nunn: "I think Ian matured, and his presence matured the R.S.C." That double maturity led actor and director to a 1977 London production of Macbeth, in which McKellen seemed to cut himself wide open with daggers of the mind. The production was regarded as definitive and won McKellen one of his three consecutive Society of West End Theater Awards.

For the moment, McKellen, who is unmarried, lives quietly in a sublet on the northern lip of Greenwich Village, from which he has recently ventured forth to start tap dancing lessons. He has nearly exhausted the usual tourist circuit but remains an enthusiastic--and perhaps impressionable--student of American folkways. "I heard a newscaster on TV and thought he sounded very affected," McKellen reports. "Then I realized he was English." He will return to England after his Amadeus engagement to take possession of his new London house on the Thames and to hang his collection of paintings (he favors modern industrial scenes of northern England, such as the work of L.S. Lowry).

He is also sure to continue his link with the R.S.C. His undiminished joy and interest in all theatrical enterprises, from the circus to a rock concert, travels easily. As Salieri, he addresses the Broadway audience directly, sometimes like a ringmaster, sometimes like a stand-up comic and sometimes, too, like a penitent. "It's not enough just to say I'm this character," McKellen insists. "The reality approach limits you." When an actor like Ian McKellen brings it back from a spin around the block, reality stands revealed for what it should be, a humble beginning.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/London and Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, Elaine Dutka

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