A consummation devoutly to be wished

Just when you think that one more movie tag "based on a true story" will send you screaming frenzied abuses while you run amok through the cinemas, here comes a film that shows how to graft fiction onto reality. Shakespeare in Love is a clever, energetic satire on theatre and film-making. Just about anyone who has sat through Shakespeare will recognise some of the quotable throw-away lines. For the bard-lovers the film is filled with great moments.

Shakespeare in Love begins with a writer of awkward hackery (Joseph Fiennes), suffering from writers' block as he struggles with his new work: Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter. He plays rival theatre owners Geoffrey Rush and Martin Clune against one another while suffering the stings and arrows of outrageous comparisons with the great Christopher Marlowe. And then enter his muse, the lovely aristocratic Lady Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow). She inspires him in writing his tragic love story Romeo and Juliet and he in turn inspires her to masquerade as a man playing his Romeo to a male Juliet since female actors in Elizabethan England is an act of public indecency.

This reviewer frequently disparages those vampires who substitute real-life references for talent, but with Shakespeare in Love writers Tom Stoppard and Marc Normandemonstrate the fine art of satire, using our knowledge and assumptions about Shakespeare to hold show business up for our scrutiny.

The film is enlivened by performances from the queen of English theatre, Judi Dench as Elizabeth, and the wonderful Rupert Everett as Kit Marlowe.

Colin Firth as Lord Wessex and Judi Dench as Elizabeth I

Make haste to your local theatre to view this great comedy --don't walk, run, as if pursued by bear.