I found that peculiar, says Hatcher who came to San Diego earlier this month to promote his film, then I realized that was the time that was when women were finally allowed to play women and Kynaston was out of a job. I thought this could be a good story about a man whos caught in a huge cultural sea change and whose identity is turned upside down because the one thing he does really well, the one thing that he identifies himself by, is taken away from him.
As Stage Beauty begins, we find Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup) in his elementon stage playing Desdemona to a packed and adoring house. When his Desdemona dies, the applause is so loud and so prolonged that it stops the production and the dead Desdemona must raise her delicate finger to hush the crowd so that the play can continue. Watching all this very closely is Maria (Claire Danes), a young woman who works backstage for the theater company as Kynastons dresser and who longs to be on the stage herself. But thats something the law and King Charles II (a hilarious Rupert Everett) forbid. But King Charles has been hinting that he wants to see something new and exciting on the stage, something that will surprise him. That surprise comes when Mariacalling herself Mrs. Margaret Hughesdefies the law. She also borrows Kynastons costume in order to perform her own Desdemona in a makeshift, underground production of Othello, in which the novelty of a woman on stage is the main draw. The performance sells out and causes quite a buzz.
Kynaston, who feels his stardom potentially threatened, dismisses the whole thing. His companys manager smells a new way to make money. And King Charles lively mistress, who has stage aspirations of her own, sees this as an opportunity to make Charley change the law. After some private coaxing, the law is changed. Maria becomes an overnight star and Kynaston becomes obsolete. Only Maria shows compassion for Kynastons plight and attempts to bring him back into the theater. When he does finally return, it is to play Othello to Marias Desdemona.
Writer Jeffrey Hatcher says The trickiest thing with the film was that we play around with gender and identity and sexual preference and notions of masculinity and femininity. And I hope the film is ambiguous in the way it deals with these things but we live in a very politically charged time where we like to pigeonhole ourselves in terms of sex and I hope the film is a little slipperier than that. But in putting it on film we always felt that we were in somewhat charged territory and thats a little bit scary sometimes.
In the hands of director Richard Eyre, Hatcher script becomes an exploration of gender and identity. At one point, Crudups Kynaston tries to teach Maria how to be a woman on stage and criticizes her for her lack of training. To which Maria simply replies that she needs no training to play a woman because she is one. Later the two end up in bed together discussing gender. This leads to some playful switching of gender roles as they try different sexual positions and try to determine whos playing the male and the female by asking Who are you now? But the lovemaking is interrupted by Kynaston the actor, who cannot prevent himself from making a snide remark about Marias acting.
For Hatcher, this scene combines two of his main thematic interests: gender and performance. Kynaston, Hatcher notes, was a man whose male lover was the Duke of Buckingham but he later married a woman and had 6 children, so the question is Is he a gay man who comes out of the closet and goes back into the closet? Is he a bisexual? Is our notion of gender sexuality a little bit slipperier? Id like people to chew on these ideas and to think about how gender and identity are all part of performance. When a man performs on stage thats a performance, but when he goes off stage hes still performing and when he meets a woman, hes still performing and in bed he may still be performing. And each of these performances is a striptease but you never actually get to the core. So I hope the audience talks about that.
That notion of performance and gender is carried out in Rupert Everetts King Charles. As Hatcher points out, Rupert is very out as a gay man and hes playing Charles II who is probably the most heterosexual of all the kings of England who had many mistresses and all that. Rupert just really goes in there and eats meat. He just tears into a role and has a great time. Hes a very theatrical actor and hes fearless Hes comfortable going over the top. I think he gives a terrific performance.
Director Eyre takes a gamble in the way he decides to introduce us to Billy Crudups Kynaston. The film opens with a quote by Samuel Pepys about Kynaston being the most beautiful woman in the house. But the first shot of Crudups Kynaston is a close up of him heavily made up as Desdemona. He certainly doesnt look like a beautiful woman at this unflattering distance. In fact, the shot makes you think that there are probably quite a few male performers who could look more feminine and beautiful, and actually trick us into thinking they were a woman. But Hatcher says tricking the audience was never their intent.
These days, says Hatcher, so much is known about a film before anyone walks into the theater. I mean how many people were actually surprised by The Crying Game? [In this film a man plays a character that we think is a woman.] So we thought lets take the mystery away from the very beginning. Lets say this is a man playing a woman, and not try to play that game. Billy says himself that he wouldnt pick himself up at a bar if he were a girl, and its not so much that you have to believe that he looks like a woman on screen. For my money you simply have to believe that a 17th century audience in a fairly dimly lit theater would accept the convention of this man playing a woman.
In some ways, this approach more directly challenges the audience to think about gender and identity, and how those notions can change. But by moving in close and highlighting the artifice of Kynaston performance, the film also does something else. It reveals a completely different acting style from what we are accustomed to today, and when Maria is finally allowed on stage, it signals a move toward a more realistic style of acting. When she and Kynaston perform as Desdemona and Othello, respectively, they engage in a rough and tumble performance, which provokes gasps from the audience, including King Charles who finally gets his wish to be surprised. Theres even a moment when the audience thinks Kynaston has really and truly killed Maria. But Hatcher is quite to point out that this realistic turn is something of an artifice itself.
In the film we jump from a very stylized form of acting to a kind of realism that you might see today. That obviously wouldnt have been the case. So my hope is that its taken as artistic license. But its not unlike when television and film started to loom over theater, and theater people started to think Well were not realistic. Once the camera taught people what behavior was like, acting changed in the 20th century. I think it was the same back in the 1660s because women didnt have to portray a notion of femaleness, they didnt have to portray the attributes of feminine gesture or voice, they were women. So that kabuki style of acting naturally would have fallen by the wayside. So I think that every generation of actors marches forward toward some form of realism and for us it might seem hopelessly stagy or melodramatic but for their time it would have seemed shockingly realistic. I think its kind of interesting that by the time we hit Brando, we reach the apotheosis of realistic and naturalistic acting, and now we dont really have any place to go except backwards.
But because Crudup makes Kynaston such an interesting character, we also feel a sense of loss when hes no longer allowed to perform. Hatcher compares this to when silent films were made obsolete by talking pictures: When a certain form of artistic expression dies forever, there is a great sense of loss. You cant go back. But of course something does die, something beautiful dies, and its necessary that it dies but it doesnt mean that you dont look back on it with fondness. And for someone like Kynaston, he obviously lost not only his star statusbecause his ego and vanity are a part of itbut he lost the thing that kind of made him who he was. The idea that the thing that defines you is taken away either by something youve done or by the force of the government, as occurs in this film, when that happens to you, you are left with nothing but yourself, and you realize that youve put too much of your life into the artificial art that youve been performing.
Because Stage Beauty is a period film, set in the world of theater and focuses on a production of Shakespeares Othello, the knee jerk reaction has been to compare it to Shakespeare in Love. But the comparisons are superficial. It would be like comparing it to A Double Life simply because both works have actors playing Othello. But in Stage Beauty, Hatcher not only uses Shakespeare to advance his plot but he also tries to enlighten audiences about the play but having the death scene performed three times, including a rehearsal in which Kynaston and Maria explore how to play out the sometimes problematic scene.
Hatcher initially chose Othello because it was appropriate to the story: Othello struck me as the perfect play because Kynaston had played Desdemona, and the first woman to play on the live stage had also played Desdemona. Then I found out that later in life Kynaston had played Othello. Here is a man whos basically a victim in the first scene and then hes the killer in the last scene. So theres a nice symmetry, a nice figure 8 to it. Its always amazing when you use Shakespeare because theres always a resonance that you can find in the poetry and in the actions to whatever else youre doing.
But Hatcher was also drawn to the play for more personal reasons: Frankly, the way we got to the scene at the end of the picture where Billy Crudup and Claire Danes really tear up the stage, came from my having seen so many productions of Othello where I was just bored silly at the end. I could never figure out why Desdemona never fought back. In every production I have ever seen, he smothers her and she might as well just lie down and die. And I thought thats just simply not realistic. So everything that comes out of that scene comes out of that simple idea of, if Im coming to smother you, youd fight back and its also part of the theme of the film too. Heres a man whos had his life taken away and hes got to fight to get it back. I hope the thematics and the dramatics are all hewing together on that one idea.
Stage Beauty (rated R for sexual content and language) takes real events about the life of little-known 17th century actor Edward Kynaston and crafts a clever and playful tale that manages to speak to contemporary audiences still struggling with notions of gender and identity. -----
