Culkin Puts Coyness on London Stage

LONDON (AP) _ Can Macaulay Culkin cut it on the London stage? <br><br>The answer depends on how you take this oddest of star turns, which finds Culkin _ now 20 _ playing a 15-year-old in 1966 Paris in

Thursday, December 7th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

LONDON (AP) _ Can Macaulay Culkin cut it on the London stage?

The answer depends on how you take this oddest of star turns, which finds Culkin _ now 20 _ playing a 15-year-old in 1966 Paris in what might seem an underage Gallic variant on ``The Graduate.''

Replace Mrs. Robinson with Madame Melville (Irene Jacob), the French teacher who gives Richard Nelson's play at the Vaudeville Theater its title, and the newly graduated Benjamin with Carl (played by Culkin), a student from Ohio studying abroad, and you have a play about two damaged souls who find release from their desolate lives in sex.

You also have _ in Culkin's doe-eyed, faintly androgynous performance _ a stage presence whose coyness is virtually unsurpassed.

At times, Culkin recalls the late Princess Diana, who possessed a similar come-hither quality composed largely of looking bashfully away.

What Culkin never gives off, though, is the innate charisma to explain the workings of Nelson's plot, which seems ever seamier the more you mull it over.

As it is, Claudie Melville's seduction of the young Ohioan comes across, at best, as deeply self-centered _ an opportunity to repair her own wounded heart rather than an awakening of a full-lipped young boy.

And with Culkin in the role, the phrase ``robbing the cradle'' is all too apt. Culkin may have grown taller since his days as the child phenomenon of the ``Home Alone'' series, but there remains something strangely unformed about him, which only adds to suspicions of tawdriness about the play.

In some ways, ``Madame Melville'' is prime Nelson material. Winner of a Tony Award in June for his book for the musical ``James Joyce's The Dead,'' the dramatist has specialized in themes of exile and dislocation _ not just Americans abroad (or, on occasion, foreigners in America), but children on the tricky cusp of adulthood.

How, then, to account for a Kama Sutra sequence and other crass sexual jokes when Nelson might have been examining a central rapport that, on this evidence, is most memorable for Culkin's persistent cowlick?

``I'm not a child,'' protests Carl early on. But as played by an actor destined to be baby-faced forever, many theatergoers simply won't agree.