Stage Beauty
Thursday, September 9th, 2004 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth""It's a rare opportunity for a 35-year-old man to be offered a role in which he has the chance to play Desdemona and Othello." - Billy Crudup
Best film of the year (so far, though there is a brace of Depps coming up) is Stage Beauty, a little-publicised BBC Films production (directed by Richard Eyre) starring Billy Crudup as Edward Kynaston, Restoration actor specialising in women's, heh, parts; Rupert Everett as an almost Cleesian Charles II: Zoe Tapper as Nell Gwyn ("Oranges! ORANGES!"); and lots of other famous Actors, mostly British.
It is wonderful. Packed with the sort of one-liners that I'd memorise word for word if there'd only been a few; splendidly, though cheaply, set (mostly interiors, though there is a Quaint Inn and a shot of Old London Bridge -- apparently a lot of the London scenes were filmed in the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, just down the road from where I live); full of little jokes and asides (Pepys scribbling away, spaniels everywhere); sweet and jolly, though not without a nasty underside that's utterly true to its period; an equally jolly, though slightly over-Irished, soundtrack; frank dialogue; and King Charles II in (historically-accurate) drag. Also some sound comments on Othello, some understated and sensitively-filmed sex / gender confusion, and plenty of social and historical realism.
We hardly stopped laughing. In fact we didn't even finish our Minstrels. I dearly want to read the original play, 'Compleat Female Stage Beauty', by Jeffrey Hatcher -- who wrote the screenplay too.
Stage Beautyis funded, in part, by the National Lottery: so one can only hope that the Daily Mail will start Disapproving, and thus generate publicity. "Lotto Funds Blown on Sex-Crazed Transvestite 'Art' Film". (Though, actually, it is xenophobic enough (a couple of unflattering comments about the French -- "whenever we do something unpleasant, we excuse ourselves by saying that the French thought of it first" -- that the Mail would probably forgive it a great deal.)
The first film this year that I've left the cinema wanting to see it again immediately. Go and see it before it disappears!
Best film of the year (so far, though there is a brace of Depps coming up) is Stage Beauty, a little-publicised BBC Films production (directed by Richard Eyre) starring Billy Crudup as Edward Kynaston, Restoration actor specialising in women's, heh, parts; Rupert Everett as an almost Cleesian Charles II: Zoe Tapper as Nell Gwyn ("Oranges! ORANGES!"); and lots of other famous Actors, mostly British.
It is wonderful. Packed with the sort of one-liners that I'd memorise word for word if there'd only been a few; splendidly, though cheaply, set (mostly interiors, though there is a Quaint Inn and a shot of Old London Bridge -- apparently a lot of the London scenes were filmed in the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, just down the road from where I live); full of little jokes and asides (Pepys scribbling away, spaniels everywhere); sweet and jolly, though not without a nasty underside that's utterly true to its period; an equally jolly, though slightly over-Irished, soundtrack; frank dialogue; and King Charles II in (historically-accurate) drag. Also some sound comments on Othello, some understated and sensitively-filmed sex / gender confusion, and plenty of social and historical realism.
We hardly stopped laughing. In fact we didn't even finish our Minstrels. I dearly want to read the original play, 'Compleat Female Stage Beauty', by Jeffrey Hatcher -- who wrote the screenplay too.
Stage Beautyis funded, in part, by the National Lottery: so one can only hope that the Daily Mail will start Disapproving, and thus generate publicity. "Lotto Funds Blown on Sex-Crazed Transvestite 'Art' Film". (Though, actually, it is xenophobic enough (a couple of unflattering comments about the French -- "whenever we do something unpleasant, we excuse ourselves by saying that the French thought of it first" -- that the Mail would probably forgive it a great deal.)
The first film this year that I've left the cinema wanting to see it again immediately. Go and see it before it disappears!
