Stage Beauty (2004)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Richard Eyre

Writers (WGA):

Jeffrey Hatcher (play)
Jeffrey Hatcher (screenplay)

Release Date:

3 September 2004 (UK)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

She was the first of her kind. He was the last of his.

Plot:

A female theatre dresser creates a stir and sparks a revolution in seventeenth century London theatre by playing Desedmona in Othello. But what will become of the male actor she once worked for and eventually replaced?

Plot Keywords:

Theatre | Actor | Gender | Homosexual | Play

Awards:

3 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Derek Hutchinson	...	Stage Manager
Mark Letheren	...	Male Emilia / Dickie
Claire Danes	...	Maria
Billy Crudup	...	Ned Kynaston
Tom Wilkinson	...	Betterton
Ben Chaplin	...	George Villiars, Duke of Buckingham
Hugh Bonneville	...	Samuel Pepys
Jack Kempton	...	Call Boy
Alice Eve	...	Miss Frayne
Fenella Woolgar	...	Lady Meresvale
David Westhead	...	Harry
Nick Barber	...	Nick
Stephen Marcus	...	Thomas Cockerell
Richard Griffiths	...	Sir Charles Sedley
Zoe Tapper	...	Nell Gwynn

Also Known As:

Compleat Female Stage Beauty (UK) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for sexual content and language.

Runtime:

106 min

Country:

UK | Germany | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital

Certification:

Brazil:16 | Australia:M | Argentina:16 | Iceland:12 | Germany:12 | South Korea:18 | Netherlands:AL | Singapore:M18 | Spain:13 | UK:15 | USA:R | Canada:14A (Ontario)

Filming Locations:

Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey, England, UK

Company:

Qwerty Films

Trivia:

While the movie does not claim strict historical accuracy, it features many characters based on actual personalities from the seventeenth-century stage. Ned Kynaston did play female roles, but also played male roles before and after women were allowed on stage. He would have been 20 in 1660, when the first woman appeared on stage. Margaret Hughes (Maria) is supposed to have been the first woman to appear in a stage production, aged 30. She did appear as Desdemona in Othello, on December 8 at the theater on Vere Street operated by the King's Company, whose manager was Thomas Killigrew, not Thomas Betterton as the film shows. Betterton was a successful theater manager later, but was only 25 in 1660. Other characters also were not historically the age that they appear to be in the film - Nell Gwynn would have been 10.

Goofs:

Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Pepys is telling Kynaston to play a man's role, Kynaston's lips are out of sync with his speech in some shots.

Quotes:

[Ned is showing Maria different sexual positions; Maria is now on her stomach underneath him]
Maria: So, who am I now?
Ned Kynaston: You're the man.
[laughs]
Ned Kynaston: Uh, you're the woman.
Maria: [giggles] And you're?
Ned Kynaston: I'm the man, or so I assume. Seldom get up here, quite a view.
Maria: But I'm the man-woman.
Ned Kynaston: Yes, you're the man-woman.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "The Daily Show: (2004-10-21)" (2004)

A Fascinating Search for What Is Male/Female On Stage

"Stage Beauty" is a clever and moving combination of the period feel of "Shakespeare in Love" and the themes of "A Double Life." In the latter, Ronald Colman is an actor who immerses himself into his role as Othello and, as in "Beauty," continually repeats and reinterprets the murder scene, with increasing realism.

The emphasis here is on male/female gender roles on stage from just before to just after women are allowed on stage. Playwright/screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher's choice to use "Othello" as his prism is significant on many levels.

All the characters agree that the productions of the play at this time in the 1660's already included the artifice that the Moor is portrayed in blackface, though this is a serious drama of passion and not one of the lighter comedies or romances with hidden or mistaken identity. The final presentation of the key scene does have the on-screen audience terrified that the actors' animosity has led to all pretense being abandoned.

Hatcher simplifies the gender issues by focusing on a play where the leads, "Desdemona" and "Othello," are unambiguous in their sexual poles, which makes Billy Crudup's "Ned Kynaston" tortured self-discovery to move from one role to the other particularly fascinating. The movie includes a brief, comic debate about the ramifications of "Rosalind" in "As You Like It" in a time where a male actor would be portraying a Shakespearean heroine disguised as a man, in what we now consider 'trouser roles' (like "Portia" in "Merchant of Venice" or Viola in "Twelfth Night").

Set in the period of the Stuart Restoration when kings are in and out of exile and a brash cockney mistress masquerades as the queen, though Nell Gwynn's influence is doubtless exaggerated, the mise en scene is a society where all are play-acting in wigs and make-up. Ben Chaplin's Duke of Buckingham, in a much more leonine role that his milquetoasts in "The Truth About Cats and Dogs" or "Birthday Girl," wryly demonstrates as he cynically moves from an affair with "Kynaston" to a rich marriage.

Claire Danes's contrasting naturalness is luminous as she has no doubts about her femininity, but is frustrated in getting Kynaston to perceive it, and not just as another artifice. While it is an asymptotic flirtation as his sexuality is left indeterminate, it is marvelous to watch "Kynaston" tentatively and painfully learn to explore his masculine side that was suppressed since childhood, on stage and off.

The conclusion seems a cri de coeur for audiences to accept gay actors as "Stanley Kowalski" in "A Streetcar Named Desire," to get across that no matter how naturalistic the acting, it is still pretend.

Director Richard Eyre's camera work swirls around a bit too much to animate the choice dialogue, but there are also outdoor scenes of dirt, violence and cruelty that open up the action from the play, thus showing the theater as a refuge from reality.

George Fenton's score sounded marvelously appropriate to the period.

Crudup's and Danes's British accents are unfortunately a bit too bland, but convincing.