Once More into the Labyrinth

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

IAN MCKELLEN ACTING SHAKESPEARE

Casually dressed in white shirt and blue trousers, he hurries down the aisle like a schoolboy late for the class-play tryouts, afraid the best parts may have already been cast. But when he mounts the bare stage--its only prop a battered chair that once had pretensions to the regal--a sense of awe seems to overcome him.

Wide-eyed, he wanders the playing area, tapping the boards with his heel, touching the backcloth bemusedly, imparting the stagestruck youth's romantic awe for the centuries of tradition gathered in the shadows of any theater.

At 44, Ian McKellen is perhaps the most respected classical actor of his generation in England (and the creator, on Broadway, of the sinuous Salieri in Ama-deus), but an adolescent's enthusiasm and wonder animate every moment of Ian McKellen Acting Shakespeare, the one-man divertissement in which he opened last week on Broadway for a five-week engagement. First concocted in 1976 and intermittently toured ever since, the show is an amalgam of personal reminiscences, theatrical lore and selections from Will Shakespeare's Greatest Hits. It gives McKellen a sort of actor's holiday untrammeled by directorial "concepts" or other actors' demands.

In his attempt to demystify and de-mythify "the Bard" (a phrase that would never escape his lips unless they were twisted satirically), McKellen establishes two reference points between himself and Shakespeare. The first is that they were both helplessly smitten by the theater at tender ages. (He imagines a boyish Shake speare falling in behind a touring theatri cal company announcing its presence by parading down Stratford's main street; he recalls himself manipulating a cardboard Laurence Olivier and Jean Simmons in a toy-theater production of Hamlet.) The second is that both grew up to be men of the working theater, practical poets striv ing for the memorable effect. Many of his selections are in fact from speeches in which Shakespeare insisted on the stage as a metaphor for the world. A scholar might find this oversimplified, but show folks have always had to seek a human-size passageway into the labyrinth of the great Shakespearean texts. The cheerful energy this approach releases in McKellen and the air of confidentiality it gives his evening are entrancing.

Slight of build, with an eminently squinchy face, McKellen is not an overwhelmingly noble presence. His Shakespearean range is probably closer to Ralph Richardson's than Olivier's. But he has wit, a mime's command of body language, and the antic courage of an impressionist. There is wonderful calculation in the way he flings himself about the stage and trots through history giving persuasive impersonations of predecessors like Richard Burbage and David Garrick, as well as such critics as Pepys and Shaw.

McKellen, at one point, even does a passable imitation of himself. If his Romeo is perhaps too much a modern teenager, or his Macbeth more empurpled than it should be, there is illuminating humor in his rendering of Hamlet's advice to the players in the manner of a rather fey modern director giving notes to his company.

And his notion that Shakespeare's kings have "the temperaments of actors" leads to a very human yet still theatrically compelling reading of Richard II's "Death of Kings" speech.

Seeking neither to define nor to grandly impose, McKellen is merely admitting the secret all good actors share: even the greatest play is best approached as an excuse for child's play, where the meaning hides, the actor seeks, and the only potential winners are the audience. Like those at Acting Shakespeare. --By Richard Schickel