Word: kean
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...EDMUND KEAN by Raymund FitzSimons...
...year guest appearance on this planet, Edmund Kean embodied everything that is exciting and treacherous about star quality. The most magnetic actor of the 19th century became as notorious for his drinking and whoring as he was praised for turning Macbeth and Shylock into matinee idols. During his last performance, Kean collapsed into the arms of his actor son and murmured, "I am dying-speak to them for me." When he died seven weeks later, the star legend was fulfilled. Jacqueline Susann could not have written it better...
...show, which opened last week on Broadway, he is portraying a man who helped define the image of the charming, demon-driven actor. The stage is suffused with a gloomy glow-the dressing room for a command performance in hell, crowded with the ghosts of Kean's past. His wife, his mistress, his dead son and his surviving one, the theater managers who wronged him and the leading men he saw as his incompetent rivals, all are evoked by Kingsley in brisk, meticulous sketches. Too brisk, perhaps: melodramatic incidents rumble past like a fleet of driverless stagecoaches. And interspersed...
Edwin Booth, who was born the year Kean died (1833), defined acting as the work of "a sculptor who carves in snow." Without sound film to record his art, an actor's performance ceased to exist on closing night. So Kingsley's Kean is a form of historical evocation, a tribute paid by one actor to another across the gulf of changing theatrical conventions. Other performers-Alfred Drake in a 1961 Broadway musical, Alan Badel in a 1971 London production of Jean-Paul Sartre's play Kean, Anthony Hopkins in a 1979 Masterpiece Theater-have played Kean...
...show is coming to Broadway next season, and the National Theater is mounting a musical by Marvin Hamlisch based on the life and death of Jean Seberg.) Ben Kingsley, the R.S.C. stalwart who won an Oscar playing Gandhi, has brought his one-man show on 19th century Actor Edmund Kean to the West End. Griff Rhys Jones, who mugged his way to TV celebrity on the BBC's Not the Nine O'clock News, is conducting a valiant but vain effort to revive the corpse of Charley's Aunt. Most of the cast treats this 1892 farce...