Taglines: A revealing comedy about what really goes on when the lights go down.
An Awfully Big Adventure movie storyline. In the film’s prologue, a hotelier ushers a child into a bomb shelter during the Liverpool Blitz. We see a brief flashback to a woman leaving her baby in a basement surrounded by flickering candles. Before departing from the house, she quickly drops a string of pearls on the child’s pillow, twined around a single rose.
Years later, 16-year-old Stella Bradshaw (Georgina Cates) lives in a working class household with her Uncle Vernon (Alun Armstrong) and Aunt Lily (Rita Tushingham) in Liverpool. Lacking an adult in her life to whom she feels close, she frequently goes into phone booths to “speak with her mother”, who never appears in the film.
Her uncle, who sees a theatrical career as being her only alternative to working behind the counter at Woolworth’s, signs her up for speech lessons and pulls the strings to get her involved at a local repertory theatre. After an unsuccessful audition, Stella gets a job gofering for Meredith Potter (Hugh Grant), the troupe’s sleazy, eccentric director, and Bunny (Peter Firth), his faithful stage manager.
The impressionable Stella develops a crush on the worldly, self-absorbed Potter, whose homosexuality completely eludes her. Amused, he gives her the small role of Ptolemy the boy-king in Caesar and Cleopatra but ignores her otherwise. Potter reveals himself to be a remorseless, apathetic man who treats Stella and everyone else around him with scorn and condescension.
He reserves his greatest cruelty for Dawn Allenby (Carol Drinkwater), a desperate older actress whom he callously dismisses from the company; she later attempts suicide. Potter also has a long history of exploiting young men. Stella is quickly caught up in the backstage intrigue and also becomes an object of sexual advances for men around the theatre company, including P. L. O’Hara (Alan Rickman), a brilliant actor who has returned to the troupe in a stint playing Captain Hook for its Christmas production of Peter Pan. In keeping with theatrical tradition, O’Hara also doubles as Mr. Darling.
O’Hara carries himself with grace and charisma, but privately is as troubled and disillusioned as the other members of the cast. Haunted by his wartime experiences and a lost love (who, he believes, bore him a son he never knew), O’Hara embarks on an affair with Stella, to whom he feels an inexplicably deep emotional connection. Stella, who is still determined to win over Potter, remains emotionally detached but takes advantage of O’Hara’s affections, seeing it as an opportunity to gain sexual experience.
The last straw for Stella is during a cast outing when Geoffrey, a fellow teenage stagehand whom Potter has been sexually toying with, bursts out and headbutts him in the nose. The cast rushes to comfort Geoffrey, but Stella exclaims that he ought to be sacked. O’Hara explains to her that Potter has spent his life harming people like Geoffrey and causing pain to people like Bunny who really love him: “believe it or not, it doesn’t much matter him or her, old or young to Meredith. What he wants is hearts.”
Concerned, O’Hara visits her aunt and uncle, who disclose Stella’s history. He finds out that Stella’s long-missing mother was his lost love, whom he then knew by the nickname Stella Maris, making Stella—whom he’s been sleeping with—his child, a daughter rather than the son he had imagined.
An Awfully Big Adventure is a 1995 British coming-of-age film directed by Mike Newell. The story focuses on a teenage girl who joins a local repertory theatre troupe in Liverpool. During a winter production of Peter Pan, the play quickly turns into a dark metaphor for youth as she becomes drawn into a web of sexual politics and intrigue.
The title is an ironic nod to the original Peter Pan story, in which Peter says “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Set during the years following World War II, the film was adapted from the Booker Prize-nominated novel of the same name by Beryl Bainbridge.
An Awfully Big Adventure (1995)
Directed by: Mike Newell
Starring: Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Georgina Cates, Alun Armstrong, Peter Firth, Prunella Scales, Rita Tushingham, Nicola Pagett, Carol Drinkwater, Clive Merrison
Screenplay by: Charles Wood
Production Design by: Mark Geraghty
Cinematography by: Dick Pope
Film Editing by: Jon Gregory
Costume Design by: Joan Bergin
Art Direction by: David Wilson
Music by: Richard Hartley
MPAA Rating: R for sexuality and some language.
Distributed by: Fine Line Features
Release Date: April 7, 1995
Views: 327
