Word: shakespeareanly
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...memorable effect. Many of his selections are in fact from speeches in which Shakespeare insisted on the stage as a metaphor for the world. A scholar might find this oversimplified, but show folks have always had to seek a human-size passageway into the labyrinth of the great Shakespearean texts. The cheerful energy this approach releases in McKellen and the air of confidentiality it gives his evening are entrancing...
Slight of build, with an eminently squinchy face, McKellen is not an overwhelmingly noble presence. His Shakespearean range is probably closer to Ralph Richardson's than Olivier's. But he has wit, a mime's command of body language, and the antic courage of an impressionist. There is wonderful calculation in the way he flings himself about the stage and trots through history giving persuasive impersonations of predecessors like Richard Burbage and David Garrick, as well as such critics as Pepys and Shaw...
...Spotsylvania Court House, "Why, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist- " But premeditated last words - the deathbed equivalent of Neil Armstrong's "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," the canned speech uttered when setting off for other worlds - have a Shakespearean grandiloquence about them...
...just want everything to be lovely," says Norman. As credos go it is modest enough, and in normal times it has served him well in his career as dresser and dogsbody to the actor-manager-spoken of only as "Sir"-whose little Shakespearean company is touring the English provinces. The trouble is, the times are out of joint. World War II's air-raid sirens have a way of going off in the middle of the old boy's soliloquies. Worse, the years have taken their toll. As Sir says, anticipating his 227th performance of King Lear...
...Dresser cannot fill its noble Shakespearean outline. Harwood would have been well advised to stop short of his last-act fling at tragedy and rest on his strength, which is for comically melodramatic commentary on the vagaries and excesses of the theatrical life. Still, he has wisely turned his original vehicle from a unicycle into a bicycle built for two, and Courtenay and Finney give it a thrilling ride. -By Richard Schickel