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Stage Beauty film review
STAGE BEAUTY
Running time: 110 mins
Starring: Claire Danes, Billy Crudup, Tom Wilkinson, Ben Chaplin, Hugh Bonneville, Rupert Everett
There's an interesting premise to former National Theatre director Richard Eyre's new film. During the Restoration period in 1660s England, women were forbidden from appearing on stage and therefore all of the great female parts were taken by men, some of them becoming grand stars of the time. Such was the situation of Edward Kynaston, supposedly the most beautiful and talented female impersonator of them all. Eyre's film attempts to ask and answer such questions as the effect of Kynaston's work on his life as well as the plight of the female actresses of the time who had nowhere to go, but it suffers in the transition from play to film (it's based on Jeffrey Hatcher's play Compleat Female Stage Beauty), is let down by a crucial casting error, and exudes a familiar if unpleasant air of theatrical self-indulgence.
Billy Crudup is Kynaston, famed for his turn as Desdemona and greatly admired by Charles II (Rupert Everett) for his onstage antics. Claire Danes stars as his dresser Maria, who surreptitiously sneaks off after every performance to give her own, albeit illegal, turn as Othello's wife in a neighbouring theatre. When the King reverses the ban on female performers, egged on by his belle Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper), the door is open for Maria to ply her trade openly, while Ned is reduced to performing as a drag act in some of London's more insalubrious drinking dens.
There are various sexual shenanigans involving Ned's relationship with The Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), a rather protracted and unconvincing tryst between Danes and Crudup after she tries to rescue him from his newly impoverished situation and several cameos including Richard Griffiths as a rich patron, Tom Wilkinson as a theatre manager and Hugh Bonneville as Samuel Pepys.
Eyre chooses to cast two Americans in quintessentially English roles and the choice is only half right. According to the press notes for the film, no British actor could have portrayed Kynaston the way Crudup does: but his strangulated vowels, unconvincing Desdemona and generally pallid performance suggest the truth may well lie elsewhere. Crudup is a strange acting phenomenon: beloved by directors but still a somewhat impenetrable figure to most cinema audiences. Danes, on the other hand, knocks him off both the stage and the cinema screen: her dazzling final rendition of Desdemona being the only convincing performance in the whole film. As Charles II, Everett plays it for laughs, and along with his unconvincing relationship with Zoe Tapper's Nell Gwynn, appears to be acting in a completely different film.
It's unclear as to who the film is meant to be aimed at: it's far too arch for a mass audience, and the more sophisticated viewers who have some appreciation of the theatre will find most of the plot turns both predictable and uninspiring.
