As a jaundiced reviewer with a dangerous private life, McKellen brings glorious life to this story of sour toffs in a dishonest decade
, Ian McKellen now portrays an ageing chancer with reptilian contempt for every single person he comes across. And incidentally, no one keeps an unfiltered cigarette in the corner of his mouth with more style than McKellen. His character is a critic, and therefore arrogant, spiteful, bad mannered and unpleasant – and who moreover abandons his much-vaunted integrity and objectivity when it suits him, to salvage his career. and Anand Tucker directs.
Erskine has an array of robust opinions about the theatre of the day, but Marber refrains, perhaps because it would be too obvious, from giving Erskine some smirking comments on young West End star John Gielgud, who was famously to be caught for an indiscretion of Erskine’s sort 20 years later, in the 1950s.
It’s a strange adaptation in some ways: Marber changes Quinn’s original plot, keeping the characters but removing a storyline about a serial killer, and reassigning the villainy — on a less obviously violent level — elsewhere. He actually makes Erskine much nastier than in the book, removing much of the lovability from the lovable monster.
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