HE’S JUST WILD ABOUT ‘HONEY’

Ian McKellen is said to have turned down $1 million to bring “Amadeus” to Los Angeles and the rest of the United States in 1981. He had played the crafty Salieri for a season on Broadway, and needed to go home to London to plug back into classical theater.

So McKellen’s Los Angeles debut was a modest one-man show, “Acting Shakespeare,” at the Westwood Playhouse in 1984. Tonight he opens at the Ahmanson in a full-scale play (in fact, there’s a locomotive in it)--”Wild Honey.”

This is Michael Frayn’s adaptation of a “lost” Chekhov comedy, sometimes known as “Platonov,” that had been of more interest to scholars than to the public until Frayn got hold of it. “Wild Honey” was a big hit for McKellen and the National Theatre of Great Britain back home in London and hopes for equal success on Broadway, after its break-in engagement at the Ahmanson.

The other day, McKellen was looking out at the pool in his Sunset Strip hotel, squinting against the sun and monitoring the celebrities in the water. “Now I know I’m in Hollywood,” he said. “Roy Scheider swimming in front of my door.”

McKellen has done movies (“Priest of Love,” “Plenty”) and would not be averse to finding a big splashy film that would set him up for the next 10 years. If asked, he would do one James Bond film--or maybe two. However, he has decided, at 47, that he probably won’t be a movie star. The camera doesn’t known what to do with him. It makes him look wispy and haggard, like a bad print of Peter O’Toole.

In person, you see that McKellen’s face is changing all the time, depending on what’s running through his head. Sometimes he’s baggy-eyed. A shift of light or thought, and he’s handsome. It’s a stage face, if there ever was one--suitable for any inscription.

His voice doesn’t change. It’s a light baritone, beautifully supported and beautifully timed. As someone has said, not only can you diagram McKellen’s sentences, you can notate them. And there is a mind steering those sentences. All British actors sound intelligent. McKellen is. He is also well-educated. Like so many directors and actors of his generation--Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall, John Barton, etc.--he went to Cambridge University, reading English literature and doing theater on the side.

“Theater was a passion in school,” he said. “But my experience of acting and going to the theater suggested that I wasn’t good enough to become a professional actor.

“When I went to Cambridge, I thought I would probably end up teaching school. What else do you do with an English degree? It was only from being surrounded by a lot of students who were determined to go into the business that I rather lamely followed suit.”

He did 20-odd plays at Cambridge, and one of the national critics called him an actor to watch. “The reason I didn’t go to drama school after that, was that I thought I ought to be out earning a living. So I rather quickly landed a job at a regional theater in Coventry. If you’re busy doing a job, you find out an awful lot about it very quickly indeed.”

But reading literature at Cambridge was formative for you.

It probably formed my approach to theater more than I realize. Ever since Cambridge, my first approach to any play, Shakespeare or “Wild Honey,” is as a text. All the work that’s subsequently done must be related to the intention of the author, whether he’s alive or dead.

For instance, in “Wild Honey,” as each scene comes along, you assume it’s by Michael Frayn. Who but Michael Frayn could have invented this hilarity? Then you look back, and there it is: Chekhov. What Frayn has done is to reorganize the play, to juxtapose, to underline the comedy. But it’s definitely Chekhov, in that the comedy is supported by very real characters and very real feelings. It’s a joy to play, for that reason.

Your character, Platonov, is a bit of a philanderer? Or a lot of a philanderer?

Well, philanderer implies immorality. I would say my character is amoral. His comic pain comes as he falls in the gap between his good intentions--he’s the local schoolmaster--and his deeper desires. He cannot keep his hands off women, frankly. And they cannot keep their hands off him. It’s that time of year in Russia when the long winter comes to an end, the snows melt, the ice floods the rivers and people come out of hibernation and go a bit mad. The air is full of “wild honey.”

You once wrote a little essay about the difficulty of playing Chekhov. What’s the major problem?

One is the translation. You can never be quite certain that what you latch on to in the translation is something that is actually there in the original. Michael Frayn writes and speaks Russian, and when he alters something he alters it for a purpose. Of all the Chekhovs I’ve done, this is the one I have most confidence in as a text.

The other difficulty is trying to be Russian. It wouldn’t be good if the play came across as an English play, because it’s not. The characters are more robust in their emotions than the English. They laugh a great deal and they cry a lot. Often in the same sentence.

English productions of Chekhov until recently have been far too mournful, too sentimental. We haven’t been open enough to the variety in Chekhov, his ability to go from vaudeville hilarity to near-tragedy, on the twist of a coin. If you can get that , you’re a good Chekhov actor.

There’s a moment in “Amadeus” that you must have been complimented for, when Salieri instantly changes from the old man to the young man. Was that hard to do?

What was hard about that was persuading the author and the director that I should do it. It was not in the script. Well, it was in the script. But Paul Scofield didn’t do it in the London production and Peter Shaffer had lost interest in it.

It is a moment that people remember. The actual doing of it, once it was worked out, was simple enough. It’s ( head down, old man’s voice ) just a question of not doing this anymore--and ( head up, young man’s voice ) suddenly doing that.

Why, when you were young, did you feel you wouldn’t make a good actor?

Well, I’d seen some very, very good actors at work. At Stratford--I used to go there every year with the school camp--I saw Laurence Olivier do “Coriolanus” and “Macbeth” and ‘Titus Andronicus.” I saw John Gielgud’s Lear. Paul Robeson’s Othello. Peggy Ashcroft’s Rosalind. And I’d seen a lot of good young actors. Ian Holm. Ian Richardson. David Warner.

You were intimidated.

Well, I was impressed. Theater wasn’t an alien world. I’d come across professional performers in Bolton, my hometown, when I used to go backstage to the vaudeville theater every week to see how it was done. It was a world I would have liked to belong to. But I could tell that you had to be very good at the job.

I think I was just realistic about it. And I was right. When I joined in, I wasn’t very good. I had to teach myself. That’s why I stayed in rep for three years and why it never bothered me how much I was being paid for a job or where it was being done. The aim was to get better as a theater actor. You can’t just put an announcement in the paper: “Ian McKellen is now a professional actor.”

You crossed paths with Tyrone Guthrie early on.

Yes, in ’63. He was the first huge influence on me as a professional actor. They were opening a new regional theater in Nottingham, which, quite typically, Guthrie fitted into his schedule.

You’ll remember that he was always very keen to discover people’s potential, and that he expected everyone to work very hard and achieve that potential. We were doing “Coriolanus.” I played Aufidius. When I’d killed Coriolanus, Guthrie wanted me to weep and wail and keel over the dead body, which I found rather embarrassing.

But he pushed and pushed and pushed me and I ended up giving the performance he wanted, and it was very eye-catching. So I’m grateful to him, not only for having made me act well but for having left me with certain unforgettable--maxims, really: “Unless you dare to do something, you will never do it.” “Your first duty is to excite the audience.”

Was there a moment during those apprentice years when you said to yourself, “I think I’m starting to get it?”

It took 10 years before I had any confidence in myself. I mean the confidence to stand up in the rehearsal room--which is one of the most difficult things an actor has to learn.

I’ve always thought of the rehearsal hall as a safe harbor, a place where colleagues have the right to fail.

Oh, I’m sure that’s true. The minimum conditions are that everyone shall be extremely loving to everybody else, and immediately call each other by their first names and be very quick to touch each other.

Still, in their heart of hearts . . . people are frightened at rehearsal. It’s a difficult process for an actor: To stand up, under the critical eye of people who have acted very well themselves, and to push yourself, and to open yourself, and to discover the part in yourself and yourself in the part. I see actors in their 60s who are still embarrassed by rehearsing and cannot wait to get in front of an audience--where, oddly enough, they feel quite secure.

What you need is the confidence to say, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happens.” Once you can say that, you can think, “Ah. Now I am worthy to be an actor.”

Speaking of rehearsals, Peter Hall says you once took off all your clothes when you were rehearsing “Coriolanus” for the National last year.

Ha! Yes, it’s true. That’s the sort of daring thing that you can only do amongst friends--even if someone does talk about it after. I think I was probably trying to shock the rest of the actors as much as myself.

Interesting--it was the same scene that Guthrie had taught me a lot about. I thought it would be appropriate if Coriolanus just got down to what he was as a person and tore off the alien uniform he was wearing. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. We never used it in performance.

Was your Coriolanus really patterned after John McEnroe?

Partly. You sometimes despair of making a personal connection with Shakespeare’s larger heroes. How can you measure up to their status? One way, for me, is to think of some modern figure who has some crucial characteristic in common with the hero. You assure yourself that there are people alive today who are like that, so why should you be frightened?

For Richard II, for instance, I thought of the Dalai Lama. Like Richard, he thought he was divine, and he had just been thrown out of his country. For the Macbeths, Judi Dench and I thought of the Kennedys, two golden people whom everybody adores. Their only problem was that they tried to slip through the democratic process--if you can imagine a Kennedy doing that.

And for Coriolanus you came up with McEnroe.

Because of his young man’s pride. McEnroe resents the attention he demands. He’s not going to share his achievement with anybody. I’ve sensed that quality in myself. Sometimes the last thing you want after giving a good performance is to have someone come round and tell you it was a good performance. Huh! you say to yourself. What does it have to do with them?

You once said that it was easier for an actor to go from a film to a play, rather than the other way round. I would think it would be harder to go from the smaller scale to the larger.

There is a sort of acting which is a cheat and which you can sometimes get away with in the theater. But you can’t cheat with a camera. It will find you out very very quickly. So to spend a bit of time doing work where there’s no responsibility to project your performance--where all you have to is be--is a good reminder for theater actors to ground all their work in that real basis.

You’ve also said: “Acting is all to do with being conscious of what you are doing, as well as being unconscious.” Is there an area in your work that you purposely don’t look at?

I don’t have any method of acting, so anything I say now I might contradict tomorrow. But probably what that means is that acting, at least in the theater, has to be a matter of technical accomplishment.

You don’t leave it up to the gods. You walk out on that stage at 8 o’clock and you’ve done your vocal exercises and you’ve eaten the right food at the right time. And, frankly, for much of the evening, while the audience is having a wonderful time watching you go through a series of emotional hoops, actually the actor is totally in control of what’s going on.

However, the point of all this preparation is that something shall happen this evening which is special to this event. I hope that every night I act, something special happens. But it’s only if you’ve really mapped out the territory, in climbing up the mountain, that you can do a little skip from that stone to that stone, where there’s a new view. It’s only because you’re well-clad against the elements that you can take these little risks.

On the other hand, we recently did a “Cherry Orchard” at the National, and every performance was improvised. Not the words, but the moves.

You can’t mean that no one knew when they were going to do what.

Oh, yes, I do. We had nothing fixed at all. It accorded with something I’ve always rather instinctively done: to just follow my instinct some nights. To take the risk of not sitting down on the sofa but leaning against the television.

It’s a wonderful way to work. It’s quite anti-director. It says: “There’s no reason why we have to decide on one set of moves and say that that’s the play. That is only one play. Another way might be just as intriguing.”

It injects a bit of that unconscious side that we were talking about. If you’re in the middle of relating strongly to the other character and you feel you’d like to go sit next to him or her, or stand above them--either is all right, as long as the other then responds to the feeling he’s getting from you.

I’d like to work that way all the time. But it probably only works in a small theater. You don’t need stage pictures in a small theater. You just need to feel the characters’ relationships to each other. At the Ahmanson, part of the storytelling is the way the characters are disposed around the stage and it would be perverse to start mucking around with that.

Are you anti-director?

There are a number of directors I greatly admire. But as a breed, I think they have too much power. They should be just the man who organizes the rehearsals. They shouldn’t be also the employer.

When Edward Petherbridge and I started the Actors’ Company (in 1972), we said: “Surely one can set up an organization where every actor can feel confident about himself because he is actually one of the prime movers of the enterprise.” And I think it did affect the way we rehearsed. It was good.

But there must be a confidence, too, for the British actor, in having a National Theatre or a Royal Shakespeare Company to come home to.

Yes. And anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a theater actor every so often goes and joins one of those companies. Maggie Smith is going back to the National. Jeremy Irons is in the middle of a season at Stratford. They’re wonderful places where you can do difficult work in a difficult way, where you can tap an audience who will be interested in what you’re doing.

It also must serve as a good refresher course: a reminder of what you started out to do in the theater; a reminder of what “the best” is.

Well, I don’t have to be reminded of that. My sallies into the commercial theater are so infrequent that I have to be reminded that there’s a world of uncertainty and risk out there--financial risk, I mean--that I have to get involved in, every so often. As with “Wild Honey.” What could be crazier than doing a Chekhov play in Los Angeles and on Broadway?

Well, we’ll see.