Reviewed - Stage Beauty: Richard Eyre's adaptation of Jeffrey Hatcher's solid play about the turmoil that hit London theatres when Charles II first allowed female actors to take the stage is such a civilised piece of work it makes you want to scream, writes Donald Clarke.
Decently acted, cautiously edited and featuring only one barely glimpsed nipple, it offers nice young men, desperately searching for something to occupy visiting grandmothers, an alternative to flower shows and boating lakes. There is a great deal wrong with it, but even its flaws are cultured, tasteful ones. I'm not sure this is a good thing.
Claire Danes stars as Maria, a theatrical dresser for Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup), one of the most famous of the male actors who took the women's roles in Shakespeare's plays before the cultural thaw that accompanied the Restoration. Each night after Ned dies beautifully in Othello, Maria sneaks off to a secret theatre where, under the name Mrs Hughes, she delivers her own Desdemona. Then, spurred on by a more than usually vulgar Nell Gwyn, His Royal Highness makes his decree. Ned faces unemployment. Mrs Hughes anticipates glory.
The film is at its best when at its most Blackadderish. Rupert Everett, clearly modelling his performance on the future Charles III, is absolutely hilarious as the idiotic monarch, and newcomer Zoe Tapper rather amusingly turns Gwyn into a young Barbara Windsor. The world offers few pleasures more delicious than a priapic Richard Griffiths, and his turn as a nobleman with straying hands will delight all followers of Uncle Monty.
But what exactly is going on between Ned and Maria? There is a romance in there somewhere, but we see so little of its progress that we have to take it pretty much on trust.
And what is Stage Beauty trying to say about acting? When Ned makes the point repeatedly that there is no art to a woman playing a woman he forcefully gets across the importance of pretence in theatre. But, by the film's close, he seems, rather anachronistically, to have fallen under the spell of Stanislavsky. Ned's final performance as Othello - all puffs, wheezes and wild thrashing - would have made as much sense to a 17th-century audience as an evening of Belgian house music. Yet, they seem to quite like it.
None of the film's bits fit together properly. Danes is smooth, relaxed and impressive. Crudup is mannered, tense and uncertain in his accent. We are jarringly dragged from one location to another with little narrative logic. And the pompously busy score seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the action.
But what really deadens the film so much is its relentless niceness. Stage Beauty should win many BAFTAs.
