Stage Beauty

Victor/Victoria meets Shakespeare in Love at A Star Is Born's house for tea: It's sexual politics, protofeminism, and 17th-century playacting in the round for those with a taste for period pieces featuring Claire Danes. That's an admittedly small niche market, I assume, but not one without its charms. Based on Jeffrey Hatcher's play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, this melodramatic study of the rise of women's acting (and the subsequent decline of the men who had heretofore played women's parts on stage) in early UK theatre is both interesting and insufferable. Crudup plays Ned Kynaston, a supremely vainglorious actor who nightly essays the role of Shakespeare's Desdemona, campily twitching her way to the grave beneath Othello's ragged pillow. Kynaston is a renowned star, who is enthusiastically courted by both male and female admirers (they find his fluttering and painted visage irresistible). When not performing or rehearsing, he's bedding the Duke of Buckingham (Chaplin), although it's not altogether apparent that he's completely gay. When his dresser Maria (Danes) is discovered secretly acting the Desdemona role at a tatty off-off-off St. Vic's theatre nearby, Kynaston's fortunes change nearly overnight as the once-illegal practice of women playing women on the stage is recast as the norm, and men like him are now ... men like him. It's a juicy, reality-driven plot that you'd think would work like a charm, but Stage Beauty falls flat on more than one occasion, despite a charged performance from the sinewy Crudup and an engagingly wacky outing by Zoe Tapper as Charles II's right-hand-harlot Nell Gwynn. She fancies Maria's far-more-realistic Desdemona and helps initiate the repeal of the male/female stage laws. She's also a cheery Cockney compared to Everett's king, who tactlessly seeks to change not only the actors but the plays themselves, hoping to make the tragic Othello somewhat more cheery. Crudup, a man playing a man playing a woman, nails a complex role that requires him to be both cannily engaging and, later in the film, tortured and vindictive. He has yet to find a role that might make people finally seek out the correct pronunciation of his surname, but here he throws himself into Kynaston's quandaries with the resourcefulness of an actor gnawing on a meaty bone. He feels correct for the part (either male or female), too, and so Kynaston's downfall is a sympathetic (and multilayered) one. Danes, on the other hand, seems miscast as Maria: It's hard to know what to think of her as she moves from being Kynaston's loyal dresser to his bedmate to his nemesis and beyond. In a film as rich with gender confusion as this, after a while you begin to pine for an onscreen surrogate who is what he or she appears to be, if only to help figure out who is really whom. For Kynaston, as with actors in general, that's not always important – the play's the thing, not, as a pair of Kynaston's female fans gropingly call it, "the thingee" – but for the audience it's a major issue, gender or otherwise.