An Awfully Big Adventure ** (1995, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Georgina Cates, Peter Firth, Alun Armstrong, Prunella Scales, Rita Tushingham, Nicola Pagett) – Classic Movie Review 1248

Hugh Grant and his director Mike Newell reunite in 1995 for An Awfully Big Adventure after their worldwide hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) for a much less winning outing – more of a tragedy with laughs this time, rather than a comedy with a tragedy.

Grant plays, rather well, a heartless 1940s gay repertory theatre manager called Meredith Potter, who flirts with the lads and gives naïve, eager-beaver teenaged cutie Stella (Georgina Cates) a chance in his cash- and talent-strapped company. The shabby postwar theatre troupe in Liverpool is staging a winter production of Peter Pan (hence the title reference to Peter saying ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’)

Famed and fruity star thespian P L O’Hara (Alan Rickman) makes a grand entrance on his motorbike then makes overtures to Cates’s Stella, who transfers her affections from Potter to O’Hara. Stella is now drawn into a web of sexual politics and intrigue.

The actors do a fine job in bringing to life an ensemble of astonishingly mean, nasty and self-seeking characters, in whose company you don’t really want to spend any time at all, and yet that is the film’s main stock-in-trade. Based on the Booker Prize-nominated novel by Beryl Bainbridge, this is not an easy one to warm to or to sell to an audience, but it does have its plus points, the fragrant old-style theatre flavour and the capable cast high among them.

Peter Firth (as the stage manager Bunny), Alun Armstrong, Prunella Scales, Rita Tushingham, Alan Cox, Edward Petherbridge, Nicola Pagett (who plays Dotty Blundell), Carol Drinkwater, Clive Merrison, Gerard McSorley, Ruth McCabe and James Frain are all welcome adornments to the film.

‘I’ve always played floppy-haired heroes, but this chap was a bitingly nasty piece of work,’ says Grant. Yes, that’s right. Okay, it’s supposed to be 1947, but it all comes over as very old-hat and anti-gay with its rancid outmoded stereotypes.

It follows two other films based on Beryl Bainbridge’s stories: Sweet William (1980) and The Dressmaker (1988).

RIP Nicola Pagett, who died on 3 March 2021 in London of complications from a brain tumor, aged 75. An Awfully Big Adventure was her last film, and her final appearance on the stage was in 1995 at the National Theatre in What The Butler Saw, with her last TV work in 2000. She also appeared in Privates on Parade, Anne of the Thousand Days and Frankenstein: The True Story (1973).

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1248

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