Where Shakespeare Calls

To Boldly Go Where Shakespeare Calls
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON

THE first reinvention of the British actor Patrick Stewart was so counterintuitive as to seem perverse. For nearly 20 years he had been a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company; suddenly, in 1987, he was the captain of a spaceship on an American television series, acting alongside a gold-tinted android and a large hairy Klingon.

For some reason it worked. With his aura of stern yet fair authority and seriousness of purpose, Mr. Stewart made Capt. Jean-Luc Picard the moral center of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” across seven seasons, helping to keep it from sliding into camp or self-parody. Hollywood took to him, and he took to Hollywood, also appearing in various “Star Trek” films and, in a variation on a theme, as Professor Xavier in the “X-Men” movies.

Now, at the age of 67, Mr. Stewart is in the midst of a third act in his unlikely career that brings him full circle: back to England and back to the Shakespeare of his youth. And while his earlier professional life here was, by his own estimation, “very sound but never spectacular,” his new incarnation, in roles like Prospero in “The Tempest” and Antony in “Antony and Cleopatra,” has been a revelation. Critics who sniffed that he had sold out “to zoom about television screens in a preposterous spacesuit,” as Nicholas de Jongh put it in The Evening Standard of London, have showered him with perhaps the highest compliment they can conjure. He has, they say, overcome the technique-destroying indignity of being a major American television star. More