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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Billy Crudup explores his feminine side and Claire Danes proves she's all grown up in this charming, billowy entertainment.
Oct 8, 2004 | I once knew a theater critic who claimed he disliked actors -- to him, they were all arrogant, raving egotists. The idea of a critic disliking actors is akin to loving sausage but refusing to acknowledge that some poor pig had to die for it.
Acting, done right, can be the most terrifying kind of emotional work. Vulnerability and insecurity, often marbled through with arrogance and self-centeredness, are part of the actor's game, but they're also among his most necessary tools -- and he's the one who has to lug them around when the cameras are off or the footlights are out. We may find actors annoying when we hear them drone on about themselves. But if that's the price I have to pay to get one Olivier, one Brando, or one Gish (or even two), I'll gladly pay it, plus the price of a ticket.
"Stage Beauty," the noted theater director Richard Eyre's second movie, is an entertainment as billowy as a Shakespearean nurse's sail-shaped hat. The picture glows with ideas -- it charms us into thinking, instead of poking a stick at us as if we were a badger in a hole (the image that always comes to mind when I hear the term "thought-provoking"). And it's deeply perceptive about what good actors do, without resorting to theatrical platitudes.
"Stage Beauty," adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from his play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty," takes place in Restoration London, at the tail end of an era in which all female stage roles were played by men. In the picture's semihistorical universe, women are prevented by law from acting onstage, but they're not necessarily missed: Some of the male actors who don wigs and dresses do such a fine job impersonating the fair sex that the men in the audience become enchanted with them.
"Stage Beauty"
Directed by Richard Eyre
Starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Rupert Everett
The lead peacock among those actors is Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup), a 17th century actor who became renowned for his great beauty in stage drag. (Samuel Pepys wrote of one performance in which, dressed in women's clothes, Kynaston "was clearly the prettiest woman in the whole house.") Kynaston has spent years in pursuit of ultimate feminine beauty, or, more accurately, the illusion of it. When he plays Desdemona to Tom Wilkinson's Othello, he thrashes a bit on the bed, prettily, before succumbing to the great beyond -- the coda to his death scene is a precise, if graceful, flourish of the hand, one of the many cartoonishly feminine gestures he has rehearsed to perfection, as if repetition of learned cues could somehow turn you into the exquisite creature you always wanted to be.
Kynaston loves the stage, and the attentions of the male and female groupies he attracts. But offstage, his identity is fragile. He feels most himself when he's playing a woman, done up in petticoats and girlish wigs, his lips rouged to an unnatural pout.
What makes Kynaston, as Crudup portrays him, so sexually alluring is that beneath the makeup, he looks vulnerable in a specifically masculine way. If the softness of woman is designed to invite tenderness, Crudup has an angular jaw you could crack with your fist. A gentleman never hits a woman, which offers her at least some form of protection. But a man trying to protect the woman within -- even as he's trying to draw her out, for the sake of his performance -- is completely exposed. Crudup understands that in his bones -- when his Kynaston is in drag, he walks like a woman imitating a man instead of the other way around, as if he believes he needs to rough up his impeccable learned daintiness in order to make it seem real.
Men in the audience may swoon for Kynaston -- he has a regular beau, George Villiars, Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), who often drops by for after-show delight -- but there is only one person who has the potential to understand him from all angles: Maria (Claire Danes), his dresser, both longs for him romantically and yearns to take his place onstage, if only that were allowed. He flirts with her, innocently, having no idea what she feels for him. She watches him rehearse alone on a darkened stage, admiring his gestures even as she mimics them exactly, having studiously learned every one: She's his Helena and his Eve Harrington rolled into one.
