Word: mckellen
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...emotionally compelling than the previous two plays. In a threadbare season, it nonetheless sheds the glow of Joseph's coat of many colors. This time Shaffer focuses on two contenders on the treacherous fields of artistic fame and glory. Both are composers. One is Antonio Salieri (Ian McKellen), a man who achieved phenomenal musical renown at the royal court of Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries...
...Salieri, Ian McKellen is less secure than Paul Scofield, who played this role in London. He lacks Scofield's ability to make a syllable wince or engorge a phrase with acrid humor. More important, McKellen does not make Salieri's early vows of purity plausible. Thus his desired revenge against both God and Mozart verges on lago's malign spirit. No cast under Peter Hall's direction ever fails to glisten with finesse, force and impeccable timing. Jane Seymour plays Mozart's wife Constanze warmly and fetchingly. Nicholas Kepros must also be singled...
...Yorkshire and tries to help. His efforts at this, his successes and his failures, are the core of the play, and the last moments-instead of being quite the cozy denouement arranged by Dickens-become a direct challenge to the audience, "a determination," as former R.S.C. Member Ian McKellen says, "to put laughter and tears into action...
...absorbs too much of the company-but Piaf, an intense piece about the French chanteuse, will open in New York this winter, arid The Three Sisters will be taped for TV. Past and present members of the company often turn up on their own in outside productions. Ian McKellen, an actor of formidable power who left the company in 1978, has since starred in the London production of Martin Sherman's Bent and will appear on Broadway this December in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, directed by Peter Hall...
...high art, it is the R.S.C. The main point about Nicholas Nickleby, for example - as about the R.S.C., as about British theater - is that the focus, the start and stop of it all, is the audience. Theater in Britain is popular art: "the people's art," as Ian McKellen says. All the reasons for that popularity can be seen in the work of the R.S.C. So can the very heights of that...