Stage Beauty (15)

Written by Jeffrey Hatcher, Directed by Richard Eyre
Screening at FACT from 3rd September 2004

Reviewed by Adam Ford

It is just six years since Shakespeare In Love graced cinema screens and picked up Best Picture along with six other Oscars, yet Richard Eyre has decided the world needs another picture about gender-bending Shakesperean performers struggling to satisfy the whims of the English crown. In a bizarre move, he also seems to have decided that this new film shouldn't have any of the subtlety, charm or humour of its 1998 counterpart.

The problem is not the casting. Billy Crudup is decent as Ned Kynaston - London’s leading portrayer of women. Claire Danes is passable as Maria - the young actual female who is forbidden to take the stage due to a legal hangover from Cromwell’s puritanical reign. There is some real talent in the supporting roles too: Rupert Everett makes a dashing if bumbling Charles II, Richard Griffiths is amusing as a lecherous knight of the realm, and Tom Wilkinson is excellent as a theatre director. The main problem is that there are vast swathes of this film nothing actually happens. Somewhere around the middle, I began deciding what I was going to have for lunch (a pecan & walnut bar and a packet of ready salted crisps), desperately trying to pass the time before the agonizingly predictable ending.

A fine cast was wasted on this pointless exercise, so if for some reason you have a particular hankering for gender-bending Shakesperean performers struggling to satisfy the whims of the English crown then I strongly suggest you rent Shakespeare In Love.