The Stage Abroad: A Double Crown

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Marlowe is surprisingly modern. His paradigm of the unnatural is presented in raw pop colors—an Elizabethan comic book. The structures are rough-chopped. The energy springs from exaltation and terror: Marlowe's discovery that man is alone. He mocks religion in the guise of popery, and he imagines the triumph of will defiant beyond limit. But he wakes in the night with the sweaty fear of death. And he sees that man makes all the moral rules there are, as he makes his own earth-bound hellfire.

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 to West End sentimental comedies. The year after he graduated from Cambridge, where he studied to be a teacher, he was playing Henry V and Osborne's Luther. His present pair of kings has won him an actor's crown.