today. hasn't been particularly eventful. rehearsal, and then Stage Beauty with nasty and ying sze -- it was an incredibly thought-provoking movie. it could've maybe been directed a bit better; the characters got rather confusing at times, but it was very well acted, and the whole thing was fascinating, because it's sort of a recap of a period in the history of the role of women in theatre. well, the first woman in english theatre, and the last guy who played a woman. and the whole idea of jealousy, sexual ambiguity, sexual identity, gender politics and all that.

and the screenplay/script is brilliant. i need to get my hands on a copy of Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which is the play jeffrey hatcher wrote before adapting it into a screenplay for the cinema.

it's like Closer, in a way -- one of those films that doesn't immediately impress you other than for its acting, yet leaves you with this unfulfilled feeling, not because the movie hasn't lived up to expectations, but because it's left you with so many things to think about and figure out. and i'm reading the director's notes etc on rottentomatoes and googling ned kynaston etc(instead of reading my history stuff, gah) and it all actually happened.

READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE SPOILED ABOUT THE MOVIE.
ned kynaston was really described by samuel pepys as the most beautiful woman in the house, and he was really trained in the cellars of london because for 18 years there was a Puritan ban on theatre altogether, there really were specific gestures the boy-actors were taught in order to act female. charles II took the throne after spending many years exiled in france, and because of the french influence took a liking to the theatre and for female actors which were allowed in france - so he lifted the ban on the theatre and allowed women on stage and issued the decree that only women can play women (this last bit under pressure from the clergy and not from nell because nell only became his mistress 8 years later; she's an anachronism in the movie). margaret hughes was really the first woman legally on an english stage, and there was rivalry between her and kynaston because she upstaged him, he was a homosexual, she was the mistress of charles sedley, etc etc etc. i don't know why i just recapped all of that. i love 16th/17th century english history. fascinating people, they were.

apparently jeffrey hatcher found a copy of samuel pepys' diary and was fascinated by his entries about ned kynaston, who apparently was as much of a star in england then as, say, brad pitt is now. or something like that, except more intense because it was just the london theatre circuit. which only consisted of two theatres at the time. anyway, he read about kynaston and thought, 'Somebody really has to write a play about this and if Stoppard hasn't done it yet, I'd better hurry up!' Which is really funny because in many ways the movie's a lot like Shakespeare in Love, which maybe is part of the reason it wasn't so impressive for me. (SiL was written by Stoppard.) but on the whole the movies are equally impressive IMO, and Claire Danes acted as fantastically as Gwyneth. they both have the whole woman playing a man playing a woman thing going on, except Stage Beauty is actually based on a true story.

and stage beauty's better in a sense, because it goes a lot deeper into the whole idea of theatre, the evolution of naturalistic acting; there being no such thing as a new play, only new audiences (i think that's what it was); the role doesn't belong to the actor, the actor belongs to the role; and most fascinatingly, the idea that men capture the essence of femininity better than a woman because women are too close to femininity to capture it the way men see it - which is a concept borrowed from the kabuki onnagata, actually. the director wrote that "female impersonation is always an imitation, it's never a state of being. And all acting is a criticism of life: when men act women it begs questions about the sexual roles we've been allocated, even if there's always a touch of parody (and implicit misogyny) in the voice and the gestures."

what i really liked was that the movie didn't make any sort of judgement on the confusion of sexual identities. it doesn't say it's good, bad or indifferent to be gay, straight or bisexual. it was a really nice touch that the movie ended with kynaston saying "i don't know" when asked who he was now. the acceptance of the ambiguity.

oh this is funny:
When asked to describe the effect of his feminine garb on his performance, Crudup laughs. "If I'm asked what it's like to wear heels," he says, "The presumption is that I've never done it before. So I feel it's imperative that I answer the question in the most evasive way possible."

and relevance to Mac's lecture yesterday about the pendulum swing in poetry -- "The passing of a style of acting usually takes a generation or two to occur. In every era there's an outstanding actor who audiences find shockingly realistic, then striking new actors appear and the iconoclasm of one generation comes to be regarded by as the mannerism of another: today's artificiality is yesterday's realism." pendulum swing in theatrical style. actually now i can't really remember why exactly he mentioned stage beauty in the lecture, can someone remind me?

ah and i JUST realised why kynaston looked so familiar -- billy crudup played the black sabbath guy in almost famous! he was very hot and i was briefly infatuated with him. and apparently that role was initially offered to brad pitt, hm. but he's short, which is part of why he was perfect for kynaston. haha. and he's acted in a production of stoppard's arcadia!!

oh another shakespeare in love thing -- the guy who played betterton the theatre owner in stage beauty, was fennyman the theatre owner in shakespeare in love, and the same studio was used as the soundstage for both the theatres in both the movies =)

it occurs to me that i would really like a Stage Beauty poster.

ok so i've finished reading reams of stage beauty synopses, reviews, trívia etc, and billy crudup's biography. and i've bored you darling readers enough so now i'm about to research the history of the word 'fuck' because i didn't think it was in use in the 17th century.

ooh apparently i was wrong:
The obscenity fuck is a very old word and has been considered shocking from the first, though it is seen in print much more often now than in the past. Its first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. Translated, the line reads “they are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].”
When the word was expelled from polite usage, becoming profane, is unclear. Some evidence indicates that, in some English-speaking locales, it was considered acceptable as late as the 17th century, meaning 'to strike' or 'to penetrate'. Other evidence indicates that it may have become "vulgar", in polite use, as early as the 16th century; thus other reputable sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary contend the true etymology is still uncertain. The two seemingly contradictory hypotheses might reflect cultural and/or regional dialects.

after stage beauty, i came home, worried about dying in a supervolcanic eruption in indonesia or an ensuing ice age, and then went to sleep, woke up, had dinner over a very nice episode of buffy where willow goes lesbian, and then i'm here reading more about one movie and related things that i've read about dictatorship in italy -- the jury's still out on which one's more relevant to my life.

but i think i'll go do history anyway. conscience calling.