Stage Beauty

Richard Eyre’s film “Stage Beauty” (R, 105 mins.) – based on Jeffrey Hatcher’s play “Compleat Female Stage Beauty” and adapted by him for the screen – inevitably recalls Keats’s line about beauty and truth. The setting is England during the reign of Charles II, and with the respective stage roles of men and women being redefined, truth and beauty are concepts in flux. The Elizabethan ban on women acting in plays was a curious exception to the practice in most of the rest of Europe; during Cromwell’s Commonwealth, of course, it didn’t matter, as there were no public theaters at all. But with the Restoration of 1660, the stage faced both the challenge of re-establishing itself and a shortage of young, trained male actors. Women were duly allowed to take on the female roles, and men barred from them.