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The Blue Room Review # 2:
Body of work Profile - Nicole Kidman
1998 The Telegraph Group Limited
Sunday Telegraph
September 27, 1998, Sunday
ONCE upon a time a glamorous screen siren breezing into town for a rare stage appearance
could reliably expect to be brutally savaged by drama critics, even the straight ones.
Years of gruelling fringe theatre in the upstairs room of a pub, years of exposure to
nudity on the stage - where on the whole the people who take their clothes off are the
people you would rather didn't - all this had left them with no use for such banal
Hollywood values as flawless skin, defoliated armpits, firm breasts, etc. But on Tuesday
The Blue Room opened at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, London, with Nicole
Kidman, and brought out the kid in every man.
"Stunning," said the Daily Mail's Christopher Tookey. "Pure theatrical Viagra," said The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer. Was that a rolled-up copy of the Telegraph in his pocket or was he just pleased to see her? Hard to tell. Fortunately, the London Evening Standard sent a woman along to peer through the sea of middle-aged male drooling and apply a more rigorous critical dissection: "Narrow hips, bosoms at armpit level, long rangy legs." Eh, thanks, but how about the play? "No - repeat, no - cellulite." And the direction? "I was concentrating on her removing her bra under her vest."
For the record The Blue Room is David Hare's update of Schnitzler's La Ronde, but who cares? "The vision of her wafting around the stage with a fag in one hand and her knickers in the other as a delicious French au pair will haunt my fantasies for months," continued Spencer, until a crack marksman from the critics' circle rehabilitation unit positioned in the balcony managed to fire off a tranquilliser dart. Just in case Miss Kidman's attorneys are planning to take Spencer to the cleaners, it should be explained that the reference to a "a fag in one hand" is Brit-speak and not an allusion to her diminutive husband. Tom Cruise is not gay, nor is he sterile, nor is he that short. What he is is harder to say, since, thanks to their diligence, he is now defined almost entirely by negatives, with a bigger collection of "nots" than a badge-winning Cub Scout. But he does have Nicole Kidman, and that puts him well ahead of most red-blooded males on the planet. His wife's play is essentially a pleasant Equity-minimum coda to their two-year stay in London mostly spent filming the forthcoming Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick. Cruise commands $ 20 million a picture, so they can afford to subsidise a little fringe theatre now and then. It may surprise London theatregoers, but, as a teenager, Nicole was not the school babe. Born in Hawaii in 1967, she was raised in Australia, growing into a gangly, five-foot-ten, small-breasted beanstalk, freckly and pale-skinned, the redhead who had to wear the protective hat while the blonde, curvey, sun-bronzed beach bunnies frolicked all around. At her first school dance no one wanted to be her partner, until finally, when every other girl was gliding across the floor, a boy was dragged kicking and screaming from the other side of the room to ask her to dance. Convinced she was "the ugliest person on earth", she retreated into Saturday-morning drama school and hanging out at Sydney's Phillip Street Theatre. "I had my first kiss on stage," she says. And, indeed, her first S & M experience - yelling "Beat me! Harder! Harder! Harder!" in her professional stage debut in Spring Awakening, Wedekind's tale of 19th-century sexual repression. So she's a heavyweight dramatic actress. Unfortunately, she married a lightweight movie star. In 1990, after critical acclaim and awards from the Australian Film Institute, Miss Kidman accepted her first big Hollywood role in Days of Thunder, mainly because she would get to appear with Tom Cruise.
As the most successful of the Eighties brat packers, Cruise is routinely reviled as the epitome of all that's most infantile in American movies. In Top Gun Cruise plays a young, talented fighter pilot. For Thunder he had hit on the ingenious concept of "Top Gun in race cars": he wears a similar helmet but plays a young, raw driver bursting with talent. Well, hey, this ain't brain surgery, though in fact Miss Kidman plays a neurosurgeon. On seeing the film her Sydney pals were convinced the only one needing her head examined was Nicole. But it was the kind of part Miss Kidman found herself in again and again: the 22-year-old world-renowned neurosurgeon, the 27-year-old world-renowned psychiatrist (Batman Forever), the 29-year-old world-renowned nuclear scientist (The Peacemaker). Some of these pictures were better than others. But in her films with Cruise - Days of Thunder and Far and Away (1992) - there was an almost total lack of chemistry. By then, however, Cruise had divorced his voluptuous wife, Mimi Rogers, and married Miss Kidman in Telluride, Colorado, on Christmas Eve 1990. They have adopted two children, Isabella and Conor Cruise (no relation). Asked if they would like to have biological babies, Cruise says: "You know, I think one day we will . . . it depends on Nic. We keep talking about four or five kids."
Mr and Mrs Cruise are about to celebrate their eighth anniversary in human years - the equivalent of a golden anniversary in Hollywood years. Meanwhile, the movie roles have improved. Her performance in To Die For (1995) was tipped for an Oscar nomination, but it never happened, possibly (so the story goes) because of an industry bias against Scientology, the Cruises' church. Scientology was founded in the Fifties by sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, and believes in using an "E-meter" to detect psychic scars, which it then heals through a series of self-improvement courses that can run to several thousand dollars. So movie stars are about the only people whose income will run to Scientology. Sitting at L. Ron's metaphorical feet as the pre-eminent disciples in the modern celebrity's religion of choice are its two power couples: John Travolta and Kelly Preston, and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Travolta has met President Clinton to discuss getting Scientology taught in schools; Cruise's lawyer drafted Hollywood's "open letter" to Chancellor Kohl complaining about Germany's "organised persecution" of his client's religion: "In the 1930s it was the Jews. Today it is the Scientologists." Evidently German persecution is not what it was: in the Thirties they sent millions of Jews to concentration camps; in the Nineties they called for one Scientologist's film to be boycotted (Cruise's Mission: Impossible). In interviews Miss Kidman wearily deflects the subject: "Tom deals publicly with Scientology. I don't." But it's hard to believe that such an unpretentious, down-to-earth Aussie girl would fall for such a lot of old hooey if her husband hadn't already signed up for it. That's the really odd thing about her: stars are supposed to be heightened, streamlined projections of themselves, but to that rule Nicole Kidman is a unique exception - the only Hollywood star whose natural speaking voice (a strong Australian accent) is unknown to the public. Perhaps that's why her characters tend to the chilly and distant - as in Portrait of a Lady, yet another "breakthrough role" that never quite broke through.
It seems likely that Miss Kidman will never be a megastar, except on the stage of the Donmar Warehouse. But, film for film, her performances will endure longer than her husband's - above all, her wonderfully malicious turn as Suzanne, the perky but homicidal weather girl in To Die For. There's a line in the original novel that didn't make it into the film: Suzanne is fantasising about her life story being filmed with Julia Roberts "or that actress that just got married to Tom Cruise in real life - I can't think of her name". On stage or screen they don't forget her name anymore. Order Blue Room Tickets Online
The Blue Room - Broadway Review #1
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