Buy An Awfully Big Adventure

An Awfully Big Adventure

New Line / Year: 1994

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Synopsis

Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman star in director Mike Newell's (Four Weddings and a Funeral) engaging comedy about a star-struck young girl lured into the grown-up world of the theater. From a crush on the company's heartless director to her first sexual encounter with the show's biggest star, young Stella Bradshaw quickly discovers what it takes to make it in the theater. An intriguing blend of comedy and passion, this provocative story is a hilarious look at what really goes on when the lights go down.

Review

A dingy 1947 Liverpool is the setting for this very British comedy-drama on life within a repertory theatre troupe. Fifteen-year-old orphan Stella (Georgina Cates) finds a family and many life lessons when she is hired as a starry-eyed apprentice and part-time actress. The troupe is headed by Meredith Potter (Hugh Grant), a maniacally egotistical gay director with a taste for using and abusing the younger male workers. Grant's Meredith is a wonderful creation -- a pale, nervous, obviously vain chain-smoker with looks that suggest a prissy, upper-class Clark Kent. A chubby Peter Firth plays Bunny, the stage manager who quietly loves the philandering Meredith but is often at the receiving end of the director's bitchy verbal wrath. Alan Rickman is splendid as the troupe's aging leading man. At its best, Adventure is an entertaining glimpse behind the curtain, but the film suffers from a disjointed story line and a menagerie of perpetually pitiful characters.