fajrdrako | Stage Beauty... (Reply)

I went to see Stage Beauty with Marion and Vicky.

How nice to see a movie with good history in it,and a good understanding of history. Not that I am any expert on the 17th century stage, but there was, I thought, a delightful plausibility about all of it. There were some familiar people, like Samuel Pepys and King Charles II, and other people who were less than familiar. Who was this bisexual Duke of Buckingham? The grandson of the one who was mixed up with James !? Or - well, I suppose I could look up the history of that family and find out.

The movie is about the change that took place in the English theatre when women were given the right to take women's roles on the stage and men were forbidden to play women's roles. The hero, Ned Kyneston, who has specialized in female roles all his life, loses his livelihood. His dresser, Maria, forbidden to go on stage all her life - she becomes Desdemona and becomes a star. But it doesn't end their: their rivalry, their friendship, their love/hate relationship continues to develop as the plot curves and twists. So where I'd expected a movie about gender roles, I got a movie about actors coming to a crisis in their craft, and learning something about their own identities.

The best scene: Nell Gwynn seeing Ned putting down Maria's audition performance as Desdemona, calling him a bitch, and dragging off Maria for a visit to the King which would change all of their lives forever. Espeically Ned's.

Through the whole movie, I kept thinking that Billy Crudup (who played Ned) looked familiar but I couldn't place him. I looked him up on IMDB when I got home, and discovered to my suprise that I've never seen any of his movies. So why was he so familiar? (Okay, so I heard his voice in Princess Mononoke, but it was his looks, not his voice, that was familiar.)

One of the points of the movie is that the acting of the time (and the skills of the protagonists) develops from a stylized, grandiose style to a more naturalistic, effective style such as we would expect in plays, television and movies. I wondered if there was anything historical about this - it reminded me of the plot of The Dresser, which dealth with a similar shift in acting style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Is that really what actors were like in 1660? If so, how does anyone know? Can we really see drama through the eyes of Pepys and his contemporaries? (I should know, I have him on my LJ friends' list, and always get a kick out of his diary entries, though he never answers my messages, the rotter.)

Marion and Vicky made a good point: that a similar change in actors' careers happened with the shift from silent films to talkies in the early 20th century.

This movie also kept reminding me of Shakespeare in Love, perhaps because of the subject matter - in Stage Beauty nothing much ever gets performed but Shakespeare, and always Othello at that, though other plays by Shakespeare are mentioned. Also because of the excellent performance by Tom Wilkinson, though I thought his performance here was better, and I much preferred Stage Beauty to Shakespeare in . Have I mentioned that Claire Danes was terrific?