When he accepted Paramount's offer to film Lady Jane, skeptics told Trevor Nunn that it couldn't be done. Now perhaps he wonders if they were right.
Lady Jane marks the film debut of Nunn, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1968 and more recently of the musicals Cats, Nicholas Nickleby, and the current hit of the London stage, Les Miserables. With such credentials, Nunn, one supposes, should have scored a hit with his first feature-length film. But he hasn't.
Many reviews, especially in New York, have been harsh. Some national magazines are neutral, and only in the Los Angeles area was the film favorably received. Some review headlines were insulting, like USA Today's, "Lady Jane Deserves the Axe," a pun on the ultimate fate of the film's heroine, who was beheaded after a regal and religious power struggle in Tudor England. However, Lady Jane deserves a more refined appraisal.
Lady Jane is filled with pomp and pageantry. It tells the story of an aristocratic, scholarly, learned sixteen-year-old Renaissance woman, Jane Gray, who was maneuvered onto the throne by ambitious relatives as a device to prevent a return of Catholicism after the reforms of Henry VIII. Her "reign" lasted nine days and ended in her execution. The movie was sumptuously filmed on location in England--the largest production ever to be mounted there outdoors. Many of the locations are exactly as they were in Tudor times--the manorial houses at Compton Wynyates that serves as Lady Jane's family home, for example, or Eversholt Priory, an aristocratic estate since the Reformation. Nunn also used Dover Castle to simulate the look of the Tower of London when it was used to house "traitors" rather than to trap tourists.
His actors, most from the Royal Shakespeare troupe, were gorgeously costumed by Sue Blaine, who had scored a previous success on screen with The Droughtsman's Contract. In short, Lady Jane was a barefaced, all-out attempt to revive the history film, a genre not seen since the days of A Man for All Seasons (1965), Anne of a Thousand Days (1971), or other British imports of two decades ago, and seen intermittently thereafter only on "Masterpiece Theatre."
That was exactly where some critics consigned Lady Jane. With all the pageantry, they said, drama was lacking.
But was it?
Nunn certainly intended the film to be both personal and dramatic. To him, Lady Jane was above all the story of a young woman of "tragic potential" because of what she learns about herself and the husband she is forced to marry--and then, ironically, comes to love. According to Nunn, the tragedy develops because "they discover things in themselves that make it impossible to compromise or to perjure themselves or lie about what they have done". Once on the throne, according to the screenplay fashioned by Nunn and writer David Edgar, Jane and her husband use their power to try, naively but idealistically, to establish a utopia, a project that loses them what little support they might have had. To Nunn, there is "something sacrificial in the story. We cry but we feel uplifted, in the way that a tragedy is supposed to work".
Nunn's lead was played by an ingénue
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