The play’s not the thing. The meta-play’s the thing. In a little-noticed movie from last spring called “The Reckoning,” the advent of realistic theater came as a troupe of 14th-century English actors tired of putting on the same old biblical morality plays. “Stage Beauty,” which opens today, picks up the story and discovers the art of the Method fully 300 years before Marlon Brando howled “Stellllla” as if his underwear were on fire.
There’s much else besides in Richard Eyre’s “Beauty,” which fails for the same reason “The Reckoning” did: It scams you into seeing historical connectivity where, really, the filmmakers are projecting their own wised-up deconstructionism into the past.
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from his play about the introduction of women actors in London theaters during the English Restoration, the movie pushes a jumble of themes on the audience — the fluidity of sexual identity, feminism and the corrupting dependence of 17th-century arts on the aristocracy.
Billy Crudup, a gifted actor (“Almost Famous,” “Big Fish”), plays Ned Kynaston, London’s most accomplished lady thespian at a time when women were officially barred from the stage. Not only does Kynaston think it’s perfectly professional to act in drag, he thinks the alternative — women playing women — is artistically inferior, a cinch. He plays “Othello’s” Desdemona with eyelash-batting melodrama, exaggeratedly graceful gestures and enough makeup to paint the entire set.
The Kynaston character is based on real history; the diarist Samuel Pepys (shown here in a bit role by Hugh Bonneville) called him “the most beautiful woman on the London stage,” but details beyond that are nil. Mr. Hatcher uses that lone sketch as an epigrammatic peg. He imagines Kynaston as a sorry transitional figure, a girlie-mon whom history is about to leave in its dustbin.
History making arrives with Charles II (a deliciously debauched Rupert Everett), who, bored with the same-old, same-old, decrees that women are allowed to act and bans men from the stage. Into the gutter goes Kynaston — who is so terminally lost in make-believe womanhood that he’s useless as a dude, hopelessly bisexual — and into the limelight comes Maria (Claire Danes), Kynaston’s virginal backstage dresser, who has been star-struck by the guy, studied his every stage move and is secretly in love with him.
Miss Danes is a little less convincing as an English girl than Reese Witherspoon was recently in another British period drama, “Vanity Fair,” where the native supporting cast outshone the American star. But she’s no stranger to Shakespeare, having played the lead in Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern “Romeo + Juliet.”
“Stage Beauty” requires her and Mr. Crudup to do a double task: play their characters and their characters’ characters.
No easy trick. They overact — it’s the ghost of that darn Method — in both cases, although Mr. Crudup gets the edge for playing his lady with a campy zest and making him/her look tragic for doing so.
The movie has some good points. I thought the dissolution of the monarchy was note-perfect; Mr. Everett purrs in passing that the English are at war with the Dutch, but, dahling, the show must go on (and mistresses must be entertained). Tom Wilkinson (“In the Bedroom”) is excellent as a theater impresario whose livelihood depends precariously on the whims of the crown.
Mr. Hatcher’s script has a few razor-sharp one liners, as when the king’s chief adviser warns that whenever the English are on the brink of doing something disastrously stupid, “we say the French have been doing it for years.”
Now there’s a centuries-old insight we can all agree on.
**
TITLE: “Stage Beauty”
RATING: R (Sexuality; brief nudity; profanity)
CREDITS: Directed by Richard Eyre. Produced by Robert De Niro, Hardy Justice and Jane Rosenthal. Written by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on his play. Cinematography by Andrew Dunn. Score by George Fenton.
RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes.
WEB SITE: https://www.stagebeautymovie.com
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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