Based on scenarist Jeffrey Hatcher's stage play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty" and directed by British theater veteran Richard Eyre, the film is set in the 1660s at the precise point when men stopped playing women's roles on stage and women were finally allowed to play themselves. Initially, the idea sounds campy and precious, especially when you hear that Billy Crudup ("Big Fish," "Almost Famous") is playing Edward "Ned" Kynaston, the female-impersonating stage actor whom diarist Samuel Pepys called "the loveliest woman on the [London] stage." He's backed by Claire Danes as Ned's female rival Margaret (Maria) Hughes and Rupert Everett as the pleasure-loving King Charles II.

But the movie is both knowingly witty and royally pleasurable itself, an exhilarating sample of the verbal wizardry and expertise of British plays and players. It's no "Shakespeare in Love," but it gives you, in many ways, the same kind of intoxicating, bejeweled diversion.

In Thatcher's script, we see Ned first at his height: ruling Pepys' London with his beauty, talent and impudence; entrancing the backstage lovely and theatrical hopeful Maria (Danes) with his definitive Desdemona; upstaging his onstage Othello, actor Thomas Betterton (Tom Wilkinson), and living it up with his suave lover Villiars, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin).

Then comes a gradual fall. Alienating the somewhat perverse Charles--whose mistress Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper) lusts for the stage--and then outraging the elephantine and randy dandy Charles Sedley (Richard Griffiths), who becomes Maria's patron and Ned's enemy, Ned soon finds himself parodying his old grandeur in taverns. It seems to be a case of "A Star is Born's" Norman Maine and Esther Blodgett in the Restoration, but there's a hitch. Maria, not yet a good Desdemona, still loves Ned. And, after all, as Shakespeare's Hamlet told us, "the play's the thing � ."

So it is.

The movie is full of top-flight English actors, including Edward Fox frowning through the puritanical Edward Hyde, Hugh Bonneville peeping away as the legendary Pepys and Fenella Woolgar ("Bright Young Things") as Lady Mersevale. But, up at the top, Americans Crudup and Danes hold their own, just as Gwyneth Paltrow did in "Shakespeare in Love."

Crudup plays Ned with both flamboyance and delicacy, suggesting equally the charming arrogance and inward vulnerability of the great actor and audience favorite. Danes gives Maria great sparkle and an ingenious way of mangling Shakespeare's lines to suggest Maria's acting inexperience. Everett has all the panache any Charles could need, and few actors in movies can be more of a pig than Griffiths, who turns Sedley into an odiously funny heavy.

At the center of it all are Hatcher's witty lines and ideas and Eyre's seductive whirligig staging. Good movies about theater--"Children of Paradise," "All About Eve," "The Band Wagon," "Farewell, My Concubine" and "Shakespeare in Love"--can be supremely entertaining, largely because we sense how much the filmmaker and actors enjoy making them and playing with all the layers and levels of theatricality. That enjoyment is palpable in "Stage Beauty," an ode to artifice, a salute to the Bard of Avon and a ballad on the war of the sexes-all of them.