An Awfully Big Adventure
| An Awfully Big Adventure | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Mike Newell |
| Produced by |
Hilary Heath Philip Hinchcliffe Victor Glynn |
| Screenplay by | Charles Wood |
| Based on |
An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Richard Hartley |
| Cinematography | Dick Pope |
| Edited by | Jon Gregory |
| Distributed by | Fine Line Features |
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Release date
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Running time
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112 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $4 million |
| Box office | $851,545 |
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.
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.
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Wikipedia