You Got the Part, Ben

EDMUND KEAN by Raymund FitzSimons

In his 45-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.

Ben Kingsley is of another species altogether: the modern character actor. His best-known character is Gandhi, the film role that won him an Oscar this year; and to that role he brought a fierce stillness and a passion for moral serenity that approach star quality. But for most of his career Kingsley has been a supporting player of the highest distinction with Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company—a satellite. The character actor cannot simply put himself on display as a star can, assured that his radiance will attract every eye. He must be a wily mendicant for the audience's attention, making up in craft what he lacks in glamour. He cannot just play a scene; he has to steal it. In a decade at the R.S.C., Kingsley proved himself the deftest of second-story men.

It may be Kingsley's misfortune that Gandhi cast him in an unfamiliar role: as multimedia star. In his new one-man 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 are snatches of Kean's most famous soliloquies, none long enough to allow Kingsley to shift into character. It might be a Shakespeare's Greatest Hits album hawked on late-night TV.

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 as a romantic hero. Kingsley's triumph is one of energy over inspiration. He seems not to realize that in a one-man show, the only person he can upstage is himself. One wants to say to him: Ben, you got the part. Relax a little, and be what you are: a splendid actor and a brand-new star. —By Richard Corliss