Performance Anxiety



by Shari L. Rosenblum

Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from his own play, recreates the last gasp of boys-who-would-be-girls in the footlights of the Restoration as a meal-in-a-can meditation on theater, gender and power. It is chopped and blended for easy consumption and seasoned for blandness. Inoffensive if quickly swallowed, it still leaves a nasty aftertaste.  

Unfolding in the time when theaters were just reopened in England, and men alone were allowed the privilege of performing on the stage, Stage Beauty seems to wish itself a social double entendre - the beauties on the stage (male to female) and the beauty of the stage (Diderot to Stanislavski, both avant la lettre ) - performers and performance. Liberated by the libertine monarch Charles II (an over-the-top Rupert Everett) with a grant of sexual orderliness, the stage becomes the center of gender honesty - the film's sexual politics suggestively progressive, but with a retrogressive streak. Gender becomes a definer - and sexuality has its cures.

At the height of the confusion is Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup), an actor out of history who was renowned for his beauty and his ambiguous sexuality (the famous diarist, Samuel Pepys -- who also figures prominently in Eyre's film -- once called him "the loveliest lady ever [he] saw"). He was important enough, as anecdote would have it, to delay a royally attended performance because he needed to be shaved (he was playing the Queen). But as the film opens, his days are numbered (and not a minute too soon, I thought to myself, as I watched his highly mannered Desdemona, dying at the hands of Thomas Betterton's (Tom Wilkinson's) Othello in falsetto prayer and broad gesture -- I would have strangled her, myself).  

Wilkinson's performance is adequate, but his role is perfunctory (Betterton would have cringed). Crudup does a fine job in the part of Kynaston, though he remains more studied than persuasive. The portrayal is marred by his inescapable manliness. However beautiful he is, he's no Jaye Davidson (though there may be a bit of Glenn Close about him). His fine features are set in chiseled masculinity - not macho, but decidedly manful all the same. Even in heavy make-up and wig of curled tresses, his age (35?) defies the girlish image the character is meant to convey. Kynaston, at the peak of his queenery, was a mere sylph of 21.

Meanwhile, off stage, Maria (Claire Danes), Kynaston's dresser, dreams of playing Desdemona herself (if only the law would allow). She watches and imitates Kynaston in every detail of his performance - a real woman learning to be a play woman from a man/woman - and steals it (along with Desdemona's pillow) for the less-than-legitimate arenas where she is free to tread the stage. Listed as Mrs. Margaret Hughes (also a true historical character), she gives a performance that is indescribably off-kilter (and yet not that much more awkward that Danes's own), but it sends shockwaves through the audience (among whom, the over-present Mr. Pepys (Hugh Beaumont)) -- and soon reaches the ears of the King and his mistress, the anachronistically of-age Nell Gwynne (Zoe Tapper) (the real Nell would have been 10 at the time).  

The rest is some shading of history. With a push from sweet Nell (it was poetically noted that she who played with the king's private scepter was able to sway his public one), a charming little tale about his mother, and a flip of the bird to the church, the ban against women performing women is lifted - and replaced with a ban on cross-gender performance. All's right for Maria, but for Kynaston, once belle of the balls, the future is unforgiving.

In its adjustment of gender identity, Stage Beauty is not generous to those of Kynaston's ilk - it does not sympathize or soften to him. It casts him as the product of a pretty-boy farm, schooled in feminine hand movements, primed for male companionship and ruled over by some predatory boytoy-trainer - an imagined predecessor of Brian Cox's Big John from L.I.E. -- his homosexuality, which the film makes explicit, as much a part of his act as his elaborate swoons on stage. He says it himself: he plays the woman's part with men. Even in bed with his lover - played by a belligerently aristocratic Ben Chaplin (who later notes that all the beds they've shared have been set on stage) - he has to play a role in flowing blonde wig.  

And when there are no women left to play? Othello, more violent than ever, still kills Desdemona (now more fragile) - and the bedroom and the stage remain aligned. Theatrical dressing and undressing come together for a set piece of sexual positions between Ned and Maria in which a single question is repeated: am I the man or the woman? Let it not be giving too much away to say that it turns out method acting and the love of a good woman can achieve amazing ends. Oh, we knew who we were then...

Sexuality and performance take center stage again in Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy: an updated cinematic equivalent to Stage Beauty's mise-en-abime, where in place of Desdemona's pleas, we have the insistent persuasions of a hell-bent lothario, and instead of the good queen's death, we have the defilement of a young virgin, infamously written, acted and recorded for the director's 2001 coming-of-age parable, Fat Girl. For the French, who call an orgasm "the little death," the transition couldn't be more natural.

While some may choose to focus on the director's good-natured self-mockery here (Anne Parillaud of La Femme Nikita plays Jeanne, a Breillat alter-ego, with perfect punch -- a sometimes petulant and indecisive leader with a rather physical style of cajoling her actors), the film is perhaps more remarkable for its own sense of sexual politics. Particularly interesting in contrast to Stage Beauty's gender definition, Sex is Comedy, like most, if not all, of Breillat's films, insists on what it means to act a women ("c'est ca, les filles," the line is repeated - that's the way girls are).

The trouble for Jeanne is that the "actor" (Gregoire Colin) and the "actress" (Roxane Mesquida, reprising her role from Fat Girl) - their names are never used, they are symbolic as well as real - hate each other. "Look at those idiots," Jeanne wails. "Have you never kissed anyone?" she calls out. The actress becomes a corpse in the actor's hands. The actor spreads his charm off camera, and wilts on set. The entire film, the director's dilemma, is set around trying to get the pair of them to look as if they're enjoying each other. ("I love adolescent love," Jeanne confesses at one point.)

Jeanne coaxes the young actor - resistant and obtuse. A prosthetic is prepared so that self-consciousness does not impede the scene -- graphically, the director discusses the shape and size of the actor's endowment. Her assistant (with whom she may or may not be sleeping) offers that the prosthetic may also help the actress - she'll know it's not really "him" touching her. But all the plastic in the world (and there's quite a lot in the end) cannot create emotion. And a scene without emotion, in Jeanne's estimation, is what becomes obscene. (You need to see and not see the... prosthesis. That's the art.)  

It's anything but obscene when Jeanne breaks intimacy down into its most intricate detail - the arm that chokes, the elbow that pokes (c'est ca, les filles). It's not quite funny - but it's droll in that self-aware French way. On set, in a bed with her assistant (who jokes about becoming excited), she pushes and pulls, echoing both thematically and in dialogue the role playing from Stage Beauty - the same ideas reverberating over the centuries, through stage and film: "I'll be the man here, you be the woman." If intimacy requires knowing who we are, faking intimacy for an audience requires knowing who we are playing. And acting, like being, requires letting go.

Breillat's got a sense of humor, but it's subtle and unobtrusive. Her sense of sex is better, it seems. Scandalmongers be hung.Nude scenes are meaningless (she hates the term); being laid bare by the camera is what threatens our core. And what makes powerful cinema.

We know who we are now.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
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