In Richard Eyre's new gender-bending costume drama, "Stage Beauty," the most beautiful woman on the London stage is actually a man.
With Bonny Prince Charlie restored to the throne, the English are ready for some serious post-Puritan partying, and Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is more than happy to oblige. Enter Desdemona in drag.
Ned, an actor who specializes in women's roles, is the consummate female stage beauty, and more than that, a star.
Every night, the wig-wearing crowd interrupts "Othello" to cheer Ned's death scene, and cloying female fans accost him backstage after the performance, bosoms heaving.
But the men lust after Ned as well; his boyfriend, the Duke of Buckingham, loves the thought of bedding Juliet, Ophelia, and Desdemona all rolled into one, with an impressive "scepter" beneath her skirts thrown in at no extra charge.
Ned's stage dresser, Maria, played by the always-luminous Claire Danes, is similarly besotted by her oblivious employer, but is left to mimic his graceful gestures from afar, silently mouthing his lines from backstage.
That is until she ushers in a new era by performing as Desdemona in a pub production of "Othello."
Ned's glorious reign seems destined to end. After some persuasive - ahem - oral arguments on the part of his mistress Nell (a trollop with theatrical aspirations and a grudge against Ned), King Charles II decides that it would be "fun" to see women on the stage.
He issues a decree that is the death knell for Ned's career: not only is the bar against women performers lifted, but now women and only women are allowed to portray female roles.
In an instant, Ned's livelihood, his life, has been stolen. What's a girl to do?
The dialogue is insightful and peppered with puns and punchy one-liners. Crudup and Danes have definite chemistry - more than Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes did in "Shakespeare in Love," (1998) to which "Stage Beauty" will no doubt be compared.
The supporting performances are likewise solid; Richard Griffiths is especially memorable as the odious, overstuffed fop Sir Charles Sedley. He really makes one hope that the face powder he piles on is lead-based.
The film's highly-effective makeup and costuming play with its theatrical themes: the aristocratic members of the audience are often as made-up as the actors, sporting towering wigs, heavy white face powder, and painted-on beauty marks in the shape of hearts and stars.
The effect grows more garish and dizzying as Ned descends deeper into his nightmare, until the characters look almost monstrous. Everyone in this film wears a mask or adopts a pseudonym, and no one seems to be able to admit who he or she really is.
"Stage Beauty" raises interesting questions about the enigma of sexual identity and the idea of gender as performance. One of the film's most quietly affecting scenes occurs during Ned's demonstration of the various positions of homosexual lovemaking: Ned and Maria trade the roles of man and woman back and forth and the facades fall away. Ned's sexual magnetism masks his fragility, his troubling experiences as a youth, and his uncertainty as to whether he is a man in a woman's form or a woman in a man's, or perhaps some other being entirely.
While entertaining throughout, the last third of the film is especially intense, as Ned is driven to desperate measures. The film's savage crescendo during the final "Othello" scene is alone worth the price of admission: its raw humanity reminds us why we continue to read the Bard after all these centuries.
However, I was troubled by the ending, which tries to wrap up the complicated issues too quickly; instead of delivering the deeper understanding of sexuality that it promises, the film falls back on stereotyped gender roles.
In fashioning a "normal" heterosexual relationship, one that uses violence as its foreplay, "Stage Beauty" delivers a feel-good happy ending that somehow doesn't feel so good. This entertaining film could have been extraordinary had it gone deeper or darker in its exploration of the roles we play and the masks we wear.
Still, this bawdy period romp will have you laughing and leave you wondering about the nature of gender, beauty, sex, death, and yes, even love.
