WIGMAKERS GO WILD

STAGE BEAUTY
Directed by Richard Eyre; written by Jeffrey Hatcher, adapted from Hatcher’s play Compleat Female Stage Beauty; cinematography by Andrew Dunn; editing by Tariq Anwar; original music by George Fenton; production design by Jim Clay; art direction by Keith Slote and Jan Spoczynski; set decoration by Caroline Smith; costume design by Tim Hatley
With: Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett, Zoe Tapper, Ben Chaplin, Hugh Bonneville, Richard Griffiths, Alice Eve, Fenella Woolgar, and Tom Hollander. Rated R for sexual content and language. Running time: 110 Minutes
1/2

Reviewed by Joel Johnson

Stage Beauty gives its audience a backstage look at seventeenth-century theater, the real people from the time, a central love story, and a play-within-the-film—Othello—by the Bard himself. If this brings to mind seven-time 1999 Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love, I must inform you that Stage Beauty is a darker and bawdier film than its sunnier cousin. Richard Eyre’s finely made film, based on Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of his own play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, spotlights sexual identity and gender confusion, offers nudge-nudge-wink-wink sexual hi-jinks, and then shows one man at the vortex of a major social change. It will directly and immediately affect how plays will be performed, but ramifications extend well beyond that. This man is bitterly opposed to this change despite his unwitting involvement in its advancement.

The setting is Restoration England. The Restoration refers to restoring the monarchy—the return of the King Charles II—following the execution of his father Charles I and the rule of the Puritan Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. The time is the 1660s. Thankfully, no detailed knowledge of the period is needed. All one need know is that the devoutly religious Puritans had sought to cleanse society of a variety of morally-suspect entertainments—including the theater. The Restoration of Charles II allowed a welcome return to earthly pleasures so that theaters could reopen, wigmakers could go wild, and a period of general licentiousness could ensue. Charles II was, of course, the king to straddle the religious divide between Protestants and Catholics by having mistresses—sometimes commonly called “whores”—of both faiths. Though our own time can probably match Charles II’s Restoration England excess for excess and then some, this is not a time for the straitlaced and the prudish.

We meet perhaps the most noted actor of the Restoration period Ned Kynaston, the film’s lead character, in the opening scene—except we may not realize that we are seeing a “he.” Ned (Billy Crudup) is playing Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello, and she dies a gloriously stylized death. Kynaston knows he is the best man at portraying women, and since women were not allowed on the stage at all—he was the “leading lady” of his time. He scarcely acknowledges his dresser Maria (Claire Danes) who is enraptured by theatre as well as being personally devoted to him. Why should he pay attention to her? Backstage after the play, he negotiates with actor-director Thomas Betterton (Tom Wilkinson) to be coowner of the theater company. He exchanges bon mots with real-life admirers Samuel Pepys (Hugh Bonneville), the famous diarist who called him the most beautiful woman on the London stage, and George Villiers (Ben Chaplin), the Duke of Buckingham, reputed to be Kynaston’s lover. Among his admirers of both sexes, there’s a percentage who feel that his portrayal of women is so convincing that he must actually be a woman. It is while indulging the curiosity of female admirers Lady Meresvale (Fenella Woolgar) and Miss Frayne (Alice Eve) that Ned sets in motion his own downfall. Ned’s pride will make several enemies—starting with the delightfully odious Sir Charles Sedley (Richard Griffiths)—and his success will begin to unravel. That same night will also show us how much Maria wants to act onstage as she pays money from her meager earnings to perform in a tavern under the name of Margaret Hughes, using her boss’s costumes. Soon their shared theatrical ambitions will be diametrically opposed.

The King hosts a soiree for the crème de la crème of London society. Ned is shocked to find himself seated across from his dresser appearing as Margaret Hughes accompanied by her patron Sedley. When Charles II expresses his boredom with the play Othello, Ned makes a facetious suggestion, intended to expose Maria as an illegal female public performer, that women like Margaret Hughes be allowed to perform onstage in theatres. Instead of punishing Maria, Charles II decides to issue a decree that women be allowed to perform onstage. As if the potential of competing with women for women’s roles were not bad enough, Ned completes his self-immolation by refusing to act with any woman cast member. This outburst of piggish male chauvinism may have gone unnoticed except that one of the aspiring actresses waiting to audition was the King’s “Protestant whore” Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper). She uses her considerable powers of persuasion to induce the King to not only allow women to play women’s roles onstage, but to make it illegal for men to perform women’s roles!

Instead of being the toast of London, Ned suddenly finds himself unable to work, stripped of the pretense on which his adulation was based, and completely vulnerable to retribution from all those he had scorned in the past. He is reduced to performing vulgar revues in an unsavory tavern. While there are comic elements in this fall from grace, we become acutely aware of Kynaston’s apparently lifelong discomfiture. Trained from an early age to perform the feminine roles in theatre, we sense that he has never been able to set boundaries between Ned the actor who plays women and Ned the man. There’s a hint that Kynaston’s sexuality may have been molded—imposed by someone else—to conform to his acting.

Billy Crudup embraces the ambiguity in this man’s life and expresses his bitterness in a carefully modulated performance that never allows the audience to forget the price he has paid, but never allows his tragedy to completely overrun the playfully mischievous erotic energy that defines the spirit of its time. His performance is convincing as both a man and a woman, is delicately nuanced, and yet also powerfully intense. Crudup’s performance is worthy of recognition for being among the best performances of the year by an actor.

Claire Danes successfully matches Crudup by delivering what may be the most mature and best performance of her still-young career. (Only twenty-five, she was the lead character in the TV series My So-Called Life at fifteen and has steadily appeared onscreen ever since.) She portrays a young woman in love with both acting and the actor Ned Kynaston. She starts as a mousy backstage assistant and then emerges as the film’s most stable and strongest character. Her character’s metamorphosis from an inept actor to a practitioner of realistic modern acting is an impressive acting accomplishment. One of the most difficult challenges for an accomplished performer is to perform convincingly just-off or half-bad, which Danes does exceptionally, though paradoxically, well.

While the film’s success heavily relies on its two central performances—interestingly by American actors—it also boasts a strong supporting cast of outstanding British thespians. Rupert Everett has had more challenging roles, but it is hard to believe that he could have enjoyed acting more than as Charles II. Newcomer Zoe Tapper gives her Nell a sexy charm that is both brazen and sweetly innocent. The versatile Tom Wilkinson plays the wily theatre actor-impresario ready to compromise artistic integrity at the jingle of a few coins. Ben Chaplin playing the Duke of Buckingham gives poignancy to the bon vivant forced to come to terms with the responsibility to continue the family line and his conflicted sexuality. Richard Griffiths manages to make the walking foppish caricature Sir Charles Sedley both over-the-top distasteful and comedically endearing. Edward Fox, ever the aristocrat, is Sir Edward Hyde, a noble courtier whose stuffy sense of propriety is developing shock-fatigue from the antics of the King and his coterie of favorites. They deliver outstanding ensemble acting.

The writer Mr. Hatcher and the director Mr. Eyre have done a good job of opening up the play for the film. Though much of the film takes place on a stage and in interior settings, the film never feels stage-bound. The look, feel, and sound of the film shows impressive work by the fine-pedigreed cinematographer, the art director, costumers, hair dressers, and the composer. Grounded in the Restoration era, the film clearly has an energy that feels contemporary and avoids the overly stagy studio settings that have sunk similar productions. This is particularly true when the film is either based on a play or is a period-piece—let alone that it is both.

If you like films that mix in history and ideas—Stage Beauty is a movie that you won’t want to miss. While it never goes tragically morose, it dares to focus much less on the story’s romantic and comedic potential. This may cost the film the accolades of a crowd-pleasing romance, but it does make the film about much more than how two people became a couple. Besides showing us a time of pleasured indulgences and two actors who do have great chemistry together, the film makes us think about what it means to be men and women as well as how we show their stories onstage and onscreen. Even though the resulting realistic acting the film suggests emerging in the seventeenth century really didn’t develop until the twentieth century, why quibble when you are having so much fun?   

 

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