THEATER: MCKELLEN IN 'WILD HONEY'

IAN MCKELLEN is always exciting to watch, and there's a lot of him to watch in ''Wild Honey,'' Michael Frayn's ingenious new adaptation of Chekhov's first extant play. As Platonov, a village schoolmaster in provincial 19th-century Russia, the English actor spends much of the second act juggling four women (one of them his wife) while simultaneously fending off a legal action, a galloping case of the d.t.'s and a halfhearted murder attempt or two. His pants drooping, his face filthy and unshaven, his mouth gummy, Mr. McKellen has the clotted sound of James Mason's Norman Maine and looks like a derelict Pierrot on speed. If he isn't rocking in a low chair that wasn't meant to rock or undulating elastically like a human Slinky, he may well be crawling on the floor in a soiled blanket, assuming the shape of a huge mutant snail.

Mr. McKellen's bravura, athletically graceful technique provides everything except, perhaps, the thing that matters most - sustained laughter. His Platonov flirted dangerously with overkill in the initial staging of ''Wild Honey'' at London's National Theater in 1984, and, at our Virginia Theater, Gogolian exaggeration eventually crosses the line into camp. ''It's like having a performing bear in the house,'' says another character. ''Will he perform or will he maul you?'' One can't ignore the mauling, but one can explain it. Retooled with new and mostly inadequate performances in every role except Platonov for Broadway consumption, ''Wild Honey'' isn't the production it once was. Mr. McKellen finds himself in the peculiar predicament of the star who strains to carry a frail supporting cast.

There are still some real theatrical pleasures to be had. In the more modulated first act, Mr. McKellen makes us feel for his vacillating, at times Hamlet-like protagonist. A quintessentially Russian ''superfluous man,'' Platonov was a once-promising ''second Byron'' who has long since declined into bitter indolence. Rebuked by life, he takes revenge by mocking the men and toying with the women of the suffocating ''mudhole'' where he is sentenced to await his ''shuffling old age.'' As he says, ''The only stories that end happily are those that don't have me in them.'' When Mr. McKellen, in dandy's attire gone to seed, pumps up his chalky voice and flushes his face to pledge undying devotion to women he transparently doesn't love, a shabby rural Don Juan achieves the pathos of a brilliant, neurotically self-conscious casualty of terminal alienation.

The characterization is given further focus by Mr. Frayn's translation. When Chekhov wrote the play generally known as ''Platonov'' - which was discovered, minus title page, well after his death - he was barely Chekhov yet. A professional humorist of at most 21, he had still not produced his greatest stories and was roughly 15 years away from ''The Sea Gull,'' the first major play. ''Wild Honey'' isn't the only distillation of Chekhov's unwieldy early effort, but it may be the most economical and witty. Even Mr. Frayn, a master of theatrical construction (''Noises Off'') and Chekhovian nuance (''Benefactors''), cannot turn a journeyman's work into the masterpiece it sometimes prefigures (''The Cherry Orchard''). Yet the adapter has achieved his goal, as stated in his published introduction, of making ''a text for production'' rather than ''an academic contribution or a pious tribute.''

Let academics have fun detailing, applauding or deploring the transpositions, telescopings, elisions and outright alterations Mr. Frayn has made in the original work. What's fascinating about ''Wild Honey'' is how elegantly the embryonic Chekhovian cartography pops into relief. One finds the dithering intellectuals, about-to-be-dispossessed gentry, rising merchants and discontented peasants of the later plays. More important, one can taste the despair of characters who ''live under dust covers like the furniture'' and regard the fruitless present as an absurd punishment to be endured until it ''mercifully becomes the past.'' What's missing in ''Wild Honey,'' as Mr. Frayn has pointed out, is the resolution of its tone into ''a characteristic Chekhovian mode.'' The play swings between the poles of farce and tragedy instead of merging them.

If ''Wild Honey'' is to emit some of that exquisite Chekhovian feeling, it must receive acting as delicate as that demanded by the mature Chekhov plays. Christopher Morahan, the director, has miscast or misdirected most of his company; the sloppiness extends to the routine matters of establishing consistent accents and filling roles with performers of the appropriate age. Though there are some good American actors on hand, Mr. Morahan can send the best of them dashing hysterically about like the backwater English touring troupe that Mr. Frayn parodied in ''Noises Off.''

Some figures on the play's country estate (the horse thief Osip, the retired Colonel Triletzky) are performed so colorlessly that they call attention to loopholes in the adaptation, making us yearn for the complete text to fill in the blanks. More damaging still is the burlesque presentation of the other characters' quixotic struggles for happiness. In the long final scene, a succession of unrequited lovers take to sobbing once they haplessly stumble upon the sorry ruins of their best plans and hopes for ''a new life.'' This being Chekhov, the ridiculously ineffectual crying jags can be funny as well as touching expressions of the futility of existence - but only if they are first presented truthfully, as cries of real pain. It's typical of Mr. Morahan's staging that he has his actors all bawl crocodile tears, thereby turning Chekhov's people into mechanical clowns and eviscerating them as victims of either tragedy or farce.

The only important exceptions to the prevailing air of artifice are Kate Burton, who conveys the devastation of Platonov's betrayed young wife, and William Duff-Griffin, whose wealthy merchant is a veritable porcupine of nouveau-riche prickliness. The company's most crucial disappointment is the gifted Kathryn Walker, whose one-note portrayal of the alluring Anna Petrovna, ''an educated woman with nothing to do,'' is an actressy exercise in throaty vocal mannerisms. Mr. Frayn picked the title ''Wild Honey'' because of the play's hothouse erotic tensions, but where is the spark between Ms. Walker (or any of the women) and Mr. McKellen?

In place of the essential sexual and psychic atmosphere, there is gorgeous scenic atmosphere designed by the redoubtable John Gunter: knee-high Russian grass, a forest of birch trees, a real moving train on its real track. Then again, ''Wild Honey,'' which might have surveyed an emerging Chekhovian forest of humanity, is now itself a vehicle - a star vehicle. One can only admire Mr. McKellen's always galvanic, sometimes successful efforts to prevent it from running off its rails.

EMBRYONIC CHEKHOV - WILD HONEY, by Michael Frayn, from an untitled play by Anton Chekhov; entire production conceived and directed by Christopher Morahan; scenery by John Gunter; costumes by Deirdre Clancy; lighting by Martin Aronstein; incidental music by Dominic Muldowney; production stage manager, Bob Borod. Presented in association with the National Theater of Great Britain and Duncan C. Weldon, Jerome Minskoff, Robert Fryer, Karl Allison, Douglas Urbanski, Jujamcyn Theaters- Richard G. Wolff and Albert and Anita Waxman. At the Virginia Theater. 245 West 52d Street.

Platonov...Ian McKellen; Anna Petrovna...Kathryn Walker; Sasha...Kate Burton Sofya...Kim Cattrall Colonel Triletzky...Franklin Cover Dr. Triletzky...Sullivan BrownPorfiry Semyonovich Glagolyev Jonathan MooreSergey...Frank MaradenMarko...George HallMarya Yerfimovna Grekova J. Smith-CameronGerasim Kuzmich Petrin William Duff-GriffinOsip...Stephen MendilloVasily...Ron Johnston Yakov...Timothy Landfield Peasant...William Cain Maids...Vivienne Avramoff and Kitty Crooks