Review/Theater; Richard III; McKellen's Richard Is for This Century

WHEN Shakespeare's Richard III refuses to eat dinner until he is brought the head of the allegedly traitorous Lord Hastings, his henchmen hustle poor Hastings offstage to do the dirty deed. But in Richard Eyre's Royal National Theater production of "Richard III," transported to the 1930's and ignited by Ian McKellen's transcendent star performance, the audience's dinner is in jeopardy as well. Hastings's severed, silver-haired head, unceremoniously dumped into a red fire bucket, is soon set before Mr. McKellen, who idly pokes a worming finger into its bloody muck as if he were searching its orifices for buried treasure or, worse, private pleasure.

What exactly Richard hopes to find in Hastings's head remains a mystery perhaps best left unsolved, but that strange, ghoulishly funny bit of business is typical of Mr. McKellen's uninhibited approach to the Shakespearean villain the 20th century has long since sadly recognized as its own. Without relinquishing any of the evil in the part, the actor finds some of the malicious humor in Richard that Brecht and Chaplin once found in Hitler. Neither a crookback nor sexually overheated, Mr. McKellen's king is a stunning antiheroic alternative to the archetypal Olivier image. He is something to see, and quickly, for "Richard III" is stopping at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for only two weeks before taking off on a cross-country tour.

The troupe surrounding the star, it must be said, is very much a road company. Except for some minor players, it is not the same supporting cast (then led by Brian Cox's Buckingham) that initiated this production in London two years ago, and its quality, often bland and sometimes poor, is far below the high National Theater standard visible right now at its home base in such productions as "Angels in America," "The Madness of George III" and Mr. Eyre's own staging of "The Night of the Iguana." Yet even at its worst, and even as it must battle royally with an acoustically inhospitable opera house, this cast can only dull, never obliterate, the rigorous intellectual and visual conceits that give this "Richard III" its distinct chill. Mr. McKellen's performance, meanwhile, seems to have gained in grotesque detail, only occasionally at the price of mannered excess, since its London debut.

Governing both the star and the staging is Mr. Eyre's typically inventive and very British vision of his updated setting. This is not another literal-minded "Richard III" set down in Nazi Germany or Il Duce's Italy. As sparely designed in black, white and blood-red by the superb Bob Crowley, the play unfolds in a paranoiac, inky, pre-World War II England atmospherically reminiscent of a contemporaneous Graham Greene novel like "The Ministry of Fear" or a Hitchcock movie like "The Lady Vanishes."

Interrogation lamps hang from above, faceless walls imprison the action, and fascism looms as an idea that the aristocracy is all too willing to entertain. Without being explicit, Mr. Eyre reminds the audience of how Edward VIII, Neville Chamberlain and Oswald Mosley might have pushed England into the fatal embrace of totalitarianism. As the weak, titled collaborators in Richard's criminal ascent to the throne meet at candle-lit formal dinner parties or dissemble in elegant Westminster cabinet rooms, they often share the stage with tableaux of plebeian thugs silencing those few citizens who bravely dissent.

It's in keeping with this scheme that Mr. McKellen is a regal English military man who is first seen marching rigidly toward the audience in uniform, braying about the winter of his discontent with the equine hauteur and dry pitch of a Colonel Blimp rather than in the addled tones of a madman. It is not until he takes off his cap or slithers in profile that we notice the deformities of his left side: a withered arm, a twisted spine and a mottled temple that recalls the gargoyle makeup of Michael Crawford's Phantom of the Opera or perhaps Jack Nicholson's Joker. Unlike most Richards, Mr. McKellen's does not truly match the physical traits others attribute to him -- those of a "bottled spider," a "bunch-backed toad" -- until that deep, unhinged point in the play when he is finally "so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin." It is also late in the evening when Mr. McKellen's voice at last roars at a dictator's pitch (in "I am not in the giving vein today") and his face devolves into a grinning, demonic death mask recalling the Weimar caricatures of George Grosz, not to mention latter-day photographs of Kurt Waldheim.

Since Mr. McKellen has few of a typical Richard's physical gimmicks to fall back on, and since this early Shakespeare melodrama (a tragedy in name only) does not give his part the psychological complexity of a Macbeth or Iago, he has lots of creative space in which to fashion an original characterization. Mr. McKellen fills it brilliantly by presenting a most contemporary tyrant, one who gets what he wants by sheer gall and the relentless, shameless push of his sharp though warped intelligence. When his Richard woos Lady Anne (Anastasia Hille) over her own husband's corpse, he wears her down with sheer wily persistence and a battering-ram personality, not charm or eroticism. Indeed, Mr. McKellen seems the smartest person on stage in every scene, with only Charlotte Cornwell's Queen Elizabeth fleetingly proving an equal antagonist.

The humor and terror in this Richard are inseparable. A cigarette dangles from Mr. McKellen's mouth at a sly Noel Cowardesque tilt even as he solicits the "happy" news of the murder of King Edward's two young sons. In the ominous Nuremberg-like rally that precedes intermission, Mr. McKellen wields a pocket Bible to adopt the public pretense of piety, then discards it with a contemptuous flick of a wrist so that he might lead the masses in a Black Shirt salute. While his Richard is, as he must be, a chameleon, faking emotions from grief to avuncularity, Mr. McKellen's highly sophisticated sense of theater and fun drives him to reveal the secrets of how he pulls his victims' strings whether he is addressing the audience in a soliloquy or not.

What the star cannot do in "Richard III" is show a New York audience how much his acting has grown in emotional depth in the dozen years since his last bravura performance here, as Salieri in the Broadway "Amadeus." Except for one brief (and beautifully done) mea culpa near evening's end ("My conscience hath a thousand several tongues"), Mr. McKellen is not allowed any introspection by this particular Shakespearean text, and the low, autumnal notes responsible for his triumph as Uncle Vanya at the National Theater this year remain unrevealed.

In a different way, this production offers only a small hint of the National's prowess under Mr. Eyre's extraordinary four-year tenure as its artistic leader. Not only is the stock supporting company (Miss Cornwell excepted) of this "Richard III" unrepresentative of the National, but so is "Richard III" itself only a tiny taste of the eclectic repertory fielded by the company on its three London stages. In our long winter of recession, both the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company have all but ceased to visit the United States. As Mr. McKellen's frighteningly insidious portrayal of a Machiavellian politician will make clear to a national audience in this election year, theater of this ferocious immediacy is one import this country should not do without. Richard III By William Shakespeare; directed by Richard Eyre; designer, Bob Crowley; lighting by Jean Kalman; music by Dominic Muldowney; movement by Jane Gibson; fight by John Waller; sound by Scott Myers. Presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Richard III . . . Ian McKellen Duchess of York . . . Rosalind Knight Queen Margaret . . . Antonia Pemberton Lady Anne . . . Anastasia Hille Queen Elizabeth . . . Charlotte Cornwell Lord Rivers . . . Alan Perrin Lord Hastings . . . Richard Simpson Duke of Buckingham . . . Terence Rigby Lord Mayor of London . . . Sam Beazley