Stage Beauty

Directed by Richard Eyre

Lions Gate

Twenty minutes into the press screening of Stage Beauty, British stage director Richard Eyre’s dramatic romp through the gender politics of 17th century theater, the film reel—quite literally—burned up. But the twenty-minute pause required for repairs was hardly a change of pace. The film suffers from a haphazard and disorganized structure; the shaky cinematography is positively migraine-inducing; and the “mood” lighting simply worked to obscure any attempt to discern what was happening.

Stage Beauty opens with Maria (Claire Danes) standing wistfully in the wings while watching a performance of Othello’s Desdemona by her employer, London’s “leading lady” Ned Kynston (Billy Crudup). She mouths his lines with practised passion, for despite a ban on female actresses in public theater, Maria—surprise, surprise—harbors ardent aspirations for thespian glory of her own.

Right on cue, a rather capricious King Charles II (Rupert Everett) abruptly reverses the law and allows only women to play female roles on stage. From there, the film follows the meteoric decline of Crudup’s Kynston from respected actor to glorified drag queen. Meanwhile, Maria realizes that under the harsh glare of the spotlight, she lacks any theatrical talent (if only Danes had reached the same conclusion prior to filming). She must reassure the enraged and borderline-suicidal Kynston who must now content himself with playing the bawdy drinking houses of working-class London where he is asked to “show us yer tits” with alarming frequency. Danes, in her characteristically doe-eyed manner, comforts him with the inexplicable (and not at all comforting) adage that he’d “make a better man than any woman.”

Stage Beauty feels like the brainchild of a producer attempting to capitalize on the commercial success of Shakespeare in Love. But, in addition to the significant absence of Gwyneth Paltrow’s come-hither androgynous sultriness and sans Tom Stoppard’s once-over on the screenplay, Stage Beauty is a raucous, vulgar mess. Between two rather abrupt (and unsatisfying) oral sex scenes, cliché moments of Maria finding her on-stage presence (again with the doe eyes) and its hamfisted themes of gender identity, the filmmakers abandoned any attempt to make a coherent and entertaining film—or to give viewers a taste of the 17th century, as Shakespeare in Love did so well.

And rather than sensitively exploring the complexities of constructing gender in a pre-Judith Butler world, the movie’s incessantly pat heteronormativity borders on the offensive: Kynston can’t be a man again until he sleeps with a woman, and there are repeated jokes about how one partner in a same-sex relationship must always play the woman. Even the lovable Rupert Everett, hamming it up in the role of the pompous but strikingly enlightened King Charles II, couldn’t redeem the film though, it should be noted, the second aforementioned sex scene involved him, a girl who looked to be about 12 and a dozen dogs on a royal mattress.

It is never clear whether Stage Beauty wants to be a comedy, a drama, a documentary or something in between. Its dialogue is replete with one-liners that fall flat, and its comic value is undermined by random senseless acts of violence (we watch Kynston beaten and bloodied, with no sense of satisfaction or ultimate moral redemption). The filmmakers missed a golden opportunity to exploit the subtle human side of a fascinating historical moment, instead creating an unconvincing hodgepodge of hackneyed aphorisms.

—J. Hale Russell