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STAGE
BEAUTY
6/10
UK
(UK-US) 2004 : Richard EYRE : 110 mins
London, the
1660s. Ned Kynaston (buff-but-sinewy Billy Crudup) is the nation's most
famous actor, renowned for his interpretations of Shakespeare heroines.
It's still illegal for any woman to appear on stage, but certain intrepid
females risk arrest by acting in underground productions 'staged' in out-of-the-way
pubs. These pioneers include Kynaston's own dresser Maria (Claire Danes),
who borrows her employer's frocks to play Desdemona at the Cockpit Tavern.
Word of this new sensation soon spreads, attracting illustrious patrons
like Samuel Pepys (Hugh Bonneville) - and even an incognito King Charles
II (Rupert Everett) and Nell Gwyn (Zoe Tapper). The capricious monarch
is sufficiently amused to issue a decree allowing women to appear on stage
- with unexpectedly dire consequences for Kynaston...
Stage Beauty
serves nicely as a post-Restoration counterpoint to Shakespeare
in Love: both are middlebrow costume romps, competently directed from
wittily literate scripts, sensibly backing up their female American leads
with a gallery of rock-solid British thespians. Alongside Everett (a definitive
Charles II?) and the movie-stealing Bonneville, Richard Griffiths shines
as a periwigged fop ("a scuff, sir, is a dreadful thing"). Adapting
his own Compleat Female Stage Beauty (first performed in 1999,
the year Shakespeare pinched the Best Picture Oscar) American playwright
Jeffrey Hatcher provides these luminaries with sufficiently lively characterisations,
dialogue and situations for the first hour to barrel jauntily along -
though theatre-veteran Eyre's directing style is decidedly of the old-school,
safe-pair-of-hands variety.
After halfway,
the script's explorations of issues of sexuality and identity tend increasingly
towards the clunky and verbose, with the crucial relationship between
the ostensibly gay Ned and the besotted Maria often as fuzzy as Andrew
Davis's distractingly soft-focus cinematography. Having deployed dramatic
licence to play fast and loose with the historical facts, meanwhile, Hatcher
finally then takes off into more fanciful realms with an extended on-stage
Othello climax in which Ned and Maria transcend their era's hammy
acting style and discover something closer to 20th century Actors' Studio-style
'realism.' In theory, this should be a laughably implausible contrivance
- but Danes and Crudup somehow pull it off, belatedly getting Stage
Beauty back to an even keel.
23rd August,
2004
(seen 5th June : Vue, Leicester : press show - CinemaDays
event)
by Neil
Young
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