Word: mckellen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Edward II and Shakespeare's Richard II. The last actor to play the two Jews on successive nights was Eric Porter at Stratford on Avon in 1965. Now, for the first time since 1903, the two kings are being doubled in repertory by an English actor named Ian McKellen, who has thus made himself the undoubted sensation of this year's ever-popular Edinburgh Festival...
...present tastes, honed to instant violence, it is by no means obvious that Shakespeare outwrote Marlowe. McKellen's Richard is Shakespeare's, full-strength and without eccentricity, a prince refined down to holy innocence, so that London Critic Harold Hobson could write that "the ineffable presence of God himself enters into him." In total contrast, his Marlovian Edward is a performance as hell-inspired as the red-hot poker that, at the conclusion, is used to murder the king by being rammed up his anus...
...McKellen and Director Toby Robertson have confronted with stark candor the fact that Edward II is a play by a homosexual about a king who was a homosexual who indeed ruined himself for an infatuation. The sum is a better play about that too-fashionable subject than anything overt or covert recently on or off Broadway. It is sensuous, unpleasant, funny, guilt-obsessed -and intensely masculine...
...Actor McKellen burns in that fire -thin, lips taut, gleaming with royalty and nerve. He has the mighty breath for the Marlowe line. He has the control to make the relentless rhythms a hammer of pulse. His Edward jumps and flickers, a petulant youth who grows in viciousness yet retains sympathy, who dies stripped to a rag and a whimper yet retains tragedy. It is a performance, paired with his Richard, that marks McKellen at 28 as an actor of potential greatness. Like most fine British players, he has been thoroughly schooled in a variety of roles, ranging from Shaw...
...Sexual Storm. Seduced, pregnant and very much alone, Sandy Dennis, an arch-valiant London waif, decides to have her baby anyway. She wouldn't dream of darkening her parents' door, and they have left for Africa anyway. She is too proud to tell the father (Ian McKellen), a BBC TV announcer who was only with her for one gravid night. Apparently she takes a dim view of his husbandly potential in any case, though she likes to gaze at him wistfully on the telly...