Ian McKellen: Acting Shakespeare (1982) NTSC DVD5

[Nguyen Trung Hoa]

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SYNOPSIS

"Ian McKellen: Acting Shakespeare" is more than just about, well, acting Shakespeare. It's a most unique one-man show: part lecture, part performance, part anecdotes, with McKellen playing the life of the party, if I can use such a term without making the actor sound like a boor. He's anything but. Lively, funny, excited to be sharing his love for the Bard and for the stage.

Originally conceived in 1977 as an expansion of a previous solo performance, "Acting Shakespeare" is built around a series of stage-themed monologues: the "All the world's a stage" speech from "As You Like It," Macbeth's woes of the tale told by an idiot, Hamlet's instructions for his "Mousetrap," etc. He performed this show intermittently for the next five years in both theaters and lecture halls, finally taking it on tour in 1982, and reviving it every now and then through 1990.

In November 1981, a performance was recorded for PBS (to be broadcast in April 1982) - this is what we see here on disc, although McKellen notes that this is no official, "final" version of the show, which he would change nightly to fit his audience and his mood, sprinkling in amusing ad-libs, dropping a side note here and there, an alteration or two to his performances. (Although McKellen penned the script, there is no writer's credit on the program, merely a "concept" credit for the actor and, of course, a "plays" credit for Shakespeare.)

You can tell where McKellen planned to deviate and where he planned on sticking squarely to the text. His lectures on Shakespearean history - which detail the stories behind the plays, the world in which they were first performed, the specific reasoning behind the choice of a single word or phrase, and so on - are more or less locked down as the educational side of the evening, while his looser anecdotes and jokes are allowed to flow.

And flow they do. Watching McKellen here is like hanging out with him at the world's best get-together, listening closely as he punctuates grand tales from his own misspent youth with corny jokes and amused quotations. He's having a ball here, holding court at a cocktail party of his own design.

Of course, the reason we're watching is to see the actor dig deep into the world of the Bard. On a bare stage, with no costume changes or props (just a solitary chair and a box, theater at its purest), McKellen is in his element - and his performances are superb. The camera gets in close, revealing minor details that would go overlooked on stage, little touches that shows the actor so fully engaged as the character.

Watching him switch so easily between multiple characters and himself is quite amusing; there's little preparation needed for him to become the roles he's known so well for so long. Notable selections include pretty much everything he does, really, although as highlights, I'd pick his brutally emotional take on Macbeth and, for novelty value alone, his interpretation of Juliet as (but of course!) a hormones-and-attitude teenager.

McKellen is mesmerizing here, educational but never stuffy, talkative but never long-winded, entertaining but never pretentious. C'mon: it's Ian McKellan performing Shakespeare for an hour and a half. How could it not be great?

Ian McKellen: Acting Shakespeare
Year: 1982
Director: Kirk Browning
Country: USA
Cast: Ian McKellen
Color: Color
Rating: 0.1


Ian McKellen wrote:

ACTING SHAKESPEARE began in 1977, when I was invited to present a solo performance for the Edinburgh International Festival. I was acting for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the time and, with my mind full of Shakespeare, it was almost inevitable that a quickly-devised show should be based on that work.

The first performance in St Cecilia's Hall was pretty tame. I'd scarcely worked out what I wanted to say, let alone learnt the famous speeches. So I had cribs stuffed up my sleeve, with prompts all over the little stage. That might have been the end of it and as I've never much liked other people's one-man shows, I shouldn't have much missed my own.

But an invitation a year later from Israel and a subsequent visit with ACTING SHAKESPEARE to wonderfully enthusiastic audiences in Jerusalem, changed my mind.

I had unwittingly issued a visa which has since taken me across Europe, often to Socialist countries and introduced me not only to the world-wide reverence in which Shakespeare is held but also to the widest possible variety of theatre conditions. I've played national theatres in Romania, Norway and Cyprus (on both sides of the Green Line); I've played universities in America and Scandinavia, a drama school in Moscow (quite illegally), an open air theatre in Washington DC, a restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as theatre festivals in Paris, Belfast, Bolton and of course, Edinburgh.

Much of this touring has been organised by the British Council, who have had to respond to the regular cuts in their grants by sponsoring more and more soloists and fewer and fewer full companies of actors.

Most recently I tapped the commercial possibilities of Shakespeare with a run in Los Angeles and New York, followed by a tour of Canada.

During these ten years the show has developed into an entertainment for Shakespeare enthusiasts who don't hear him in English as often as they would like. I hope Londoners ? with a host of full-scale Shakespeare readily on tap ? will welcome ACTING SHAKESPEARE.

I'm grateful to you for buying this souvenir of an occasion when we met to honour Shakespeare and two causes which I unreservedly support.

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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0269355/

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IMDb.............: User Rating of 7.9/10

 Year.............: 1982
 Country..........: USA
 Runtime..........: 90 Minutes
 Audio............: English (Dolby Digital)
 Subtitles........: English
 Video Format.....: NTSC
 Aspect Ratio.....: 1.33 :1
 DVD Source.......: DVD5
 DVD Distributor..: E1 Entertainment
 Program..........: AnyDVD

Menus............: Untouched
Video............: Untouched
DVD-extras.......: Untouched
DVD-Audio........: Untouched

Epic performer, charming guy... good stuff

Enjoy

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