`ENEMY' LINES; MCKELLEN SPEAKS HIS MIND IN, ON IBSEN CLASSIC.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

He speaks the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so naturally everyone hates him.

He's a congenital naysayer, a world-class party pooper. He's the perfect example of what Spiro Agnew once infamously called a ``nattering nabob of negativism.'' Translation: Someone who can't help telling it like it is - or, maybe, like it ought to be.

He's Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the beleaguered, whistle-blowing hero of Henrik Ibsen's sobering comedy, ``An Enemy of the People,'' which is opening an eight-week run Wednesday night at the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. And although Ibsen's rarely performed masterpiece turns 116 this year, its title character may never have looked more contemporary.

``The example I keep using is Dr. (Jack) Kevorkian - what do you call him, Dr. Death? - the man who helps people to die,'' says Ian McKellen, the deceptively soft-spoken British actor who plays Stockmann in the lavish production being brought here by Britain's Royal National Theatre and helmed by its artistic director, Trevor Nunn.

``Whatever you think of his (Kevorkian's) stance - and I happen to be very sympathetic to it - he's not a good advocate for it,'' McKellen continues, ``because when he gets in front of a camera or a microphone, he starts swearing. He goes beyond his case and presents the paranoia of someone whose self-evident truth is being rejected by society at large. And that's why he's got good lawyers. Stockmann doesn't have any lawyers.''

Or, McKellen might've added, a good Hollywood press agent.

As the medical officer of a coastal Norwegian village, Stockmann fatefully discovers that the town's new cash-cow spa baths are being poisoned by industrial slime. His insistence on going public with the ugly facts results in a head-on collision - first with the boosterish city fathers (including Stockmann's brother, the mayor), then with a self-styled radical newspaper editor and, finally, with a howling mob that blames him for threatening the town's livelihood.

The more others try to stifle Stockmann, the more he refuses to shut up. He's a mishmash of honesty and stubbornness, sophistication and naivete, courage and self-righteousness. Picture a Scandinavian Ralph Nader, with less self-control and a better sense of humor, and you're getting warm.

``He's an utterly believable character,'' says McKellen, his blue eyes peering mildly from behind wire-frame glasses. ``But he's not the best advocate for his point of view. He needs a good spin doctor, he needs a good PR person, but one wasn't available. He was representing himself in court, as it were. And his reward is to be called an enemy of the people.''

Working with a new translation by British playwright Christopher Hampton (``Les Liaisons Dangereuses''), the production offers a very different slant from the one Arthur Miller proposed in his familiar English-language translation.

Writing in the thick of the Cold War and Joe McCarthy's persecutorial antics, Miller turned Stockmann into a martyred hero and ``An Enemy of the People'' into an allegory of political oppression (a theme Miller returned to three years later when he wrote ``The Crucible'').Though Miller's version was powerful for its time, Hampton sees Stockmann in a more ambivalent light.

``I'm a great admirer of Arthur Miller and like very much what he's done,'' Hampton says. ``But it's not the play. It's sort of contrary to what Ibsen intended, which is to create a very ambiguous character, a character you admire greatly but you also are able to count the cost of what he does and to sympathize with the people who have to put up with him. Any great idealist is often a pain in the a-- to live with.''

McKellen's reviews certainly didn't need any spin-doctoring when ``An Enemy of the People'' premiered in London last September. ``Brilliantly portrayed'' raved the Independent. ``Superb,'' declared the Times Literary Supplement, ``McKellen lets you see what is admirable and what is absurd in this ingenuous idealist.''

Flying Nunn

The production also proved to be a smashing critical debut for director Nunn, who took over the National Theatre in 1997 and is steering a course between glossy classics, glittering Broadway musicals and new plays.

As the former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company (1968 to 1986), Nunn oversaw such blockbusters as the marathon ``Nicholas Nickleby,'' which won five Tony Awards. In between Shakespeare and Chekhov, he brought several of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals, including ``Cats'' and ``Sunset Boulevard,'' to the West End and Broadway. In the process, he aroused the suspicion of Britain's ``serious'' arts establishment, which tends to regard commercial success as proof of a pact with Satan.

The Ahmanson and its parent, Center Theatre Group, have a history with the National dating back to 1970, when it hosted ``The Beaux Strategem'' and ``Three Sisters,'' and extending through a 1994 production of David Hare's ``Racing Demon.'' McKellen himself was last seen at the Ahmanson in ``Wild Honey'' in 1986. More recently, he starred in Richard Eyre's production of ``Richard III,'' whose lengthy North American tour included a stop at UCLA's Royce Hall.

``I think Los Angeles needs to see great acting wherever I can find it, because it doesn't happen as a matter of course,'' says Gordon Davidson, producing artistic director of the Ahmanson and the Mark Taper Forum.

``It's still too hard to get American actors who might turn in performances like that to commit. I don't have a problem with the fact that the Brits do it. In fact, I want to share it more.''

Advocate as advocate

In some respects, the part of Stockmann seems custom-made for McKellen, Britain's most publicly visible and vocal gay actor. Since publicly acknowledging his homosexuality in 1991, shortly after he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, McKellen has spoken out widely in support of gay rights while urging other gay actors to abandon their closets and do likewise.

Last year, he brought to Los Angles his one-man show ``A Knight Out,'' a frank, funny rumination on his twin odysseys as an artist and a gay man. McKellen has used the show to raise thousands of dollars for health organizations and various agencies that serve primarily gay clienteles.

Unlike Stockmann, however, McKellen's views haven't made him a pariah, probably because the 59-year-old actor manages to maintain his polite, chivalric bearing even while taking an admitted pleasure in stirring things up.

``In terms of a human-rights movement,'' McKellen asks rhetorically, ``am I on the side of those who are in the streets, frightening the (police) horses, shouting, drawing attention, behaving outrageously, committing civil disobedience or, indeed, breaking the law? No; that's a very theatrical way of going on, and I do an awful lot of theatrics professionally. I don't need all that, frankly. So I'm on the side of those who are making the case, arguing it through, being rational, saying that you've got to come around to my point of view because I'm right on this. And doing it on the telephone, in a letter, in private conversation, constantly making the point to the people who've got the power.

``Now, I know that the two approaches are not independent. They have a common root and, indeed, a common aim. And I'm never critical, privately or publicly, of those who do things that I don't choose to do myself. Everybody does what they can or should do. And it's collectively that the case is made and, hopefully, the world improves.''

It's always something

In a period when man-made disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have become code terms for deceit and bureaucratic bungling, it's easy to think of ``An Enemy of the People'' as a play chillingly ahead of its time.

``There've been any number of Stockmann-like situations over the years,'' Hampton observes. ``This whole mad-cow business in England is one, where you had people saying, `Look, this infected meat is going out into the market, and people will die,' and other people are telling everyone not to worry. It's vested interests.''

However, Sir Ian cautions, at bottom Ibsen's play is really a domestic drama, not a cautionary tale about The Media, Big Government or The Environment.

``These are big, big, big issues - but never presented as polemic, never as rhetoric,'' he says. ``It's not a play of ideas, it's a play about actually a man and his family and his kids, and a man and his brother, a man and his friends. And that's great writing - that was the form, the dramatic form, that Ibsen invented, and which Arthur Miller and Bernard Shaw and Tony Kushner and David Mamet have been writing ever since.''

THE FACTS

What: ``An Enemy of the People.''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles.

When: Previews at 2 and 8 p.m. today. Opens 8 p.m. Wednesday, performances continuing 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays; through Sept. 6.

Tickets: $15 to $52.50. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) THE `PEOPLE'S' CHOICE (Sir Ian McKellen)

(2) Sir Ian McKellen compares his whistle-blowing Dr. Thomas Stockmann character in Henrik Ibsen's ``An Enemy of the People'' to Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

Tina Gerson/Daily News

(3) Ian McKellen and Charlotte Cornwell star in the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain production of Ibsen's ``An Enemy of the People,'' adapted by Christopher Hampton and directed by Trevor Nunn.