Awfully Big Adventure, An

Director Mike Newell brings An Awfully Big Adventure to life, a movie based on the novel be Beryl Bainbridge. In Liverpool after World War II, young Stella Bradshaw (Georgina Cates), becomes the stage manager of a seedy theatrical company. She falls in love with the company’s arrogant homosexual director, Meredith Potter (Hugh Grant), but succumbs to the advances of the eccentric actor, P.L. O’Hara, (Alan Rickman) who is playing Captain Hook in the company’s production of Peter Pan. Her sexual encounters with O’Hara are a lesson in what it takes to make it in the theater. Billed as a comedy, An Awfully Big Adventure is a disturbing film about child abuse, rape and incest in the grown-up world of the theater.