As a jaundiced reviewer with a dangerous private life, McKellen brings glorious life to this story of sour toffs in a dishonest decade
Channelling something of his big-screen Richard III from almost 30 years ago, 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. (Erm, is this a documentary?)
Screenwriter Patrick Marber freely adapts the page-turning bestseller Curtain Call by author and critic Anthony Quinn and Anand Tucker directs. McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, a cantankerous and much feared theatre critic in 1930s London whose open-secret nocturnal encounters in public parks with young men are beginning to discomfit his proprietor Viscount Brooke (Mark Strong), who pompously announces his determination to make his publication Britain’s foremost “family newspaper”.
