A loud knock at the door. Is it death or merely the cabman announcing the ordered taxi? There are endless doubles and reflections in Neil Bartlett’s Stella, which opened at the Brighton festival and arrives at Hoxton Hall, London, this week as part of the London international festival of theatre (LIFT). It operates like a shattered mirror whose shards endlessly reflect back the truth and its distortions, facts and fictions, offering both a man waiting for the end of his life and an exuberant 21-year-old woman waiting for the party to start.
Almost 30 years ago, in his book Who Was That Man?, Bartlett considered the case of the 19th-century cross-dresser Ernest Boulton. Reinventing himself as Stella, a bright butterfly who lit up the West End, she lived with Tory MP Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton until she flew too close to the sun and was brought down by scandal.
Now Bartlett returns to the story in a compelling if sometimes frustrating piece that offers us a glimpse of the dying Boulton, aged 56, sitting alone in a dingy Euston parlour – like something out of Beckett – and the 21-year-old Stella on the night before catastrophe overtook her. The pair are watched over by a silent figure (David Carr), whose ambiguities add to the texturing of a show that, like so much of Bartlett’s work, succeeds in being as plain as a Quaker funeral and yet disconcertingly voluptuous, too.
Stella is all about concealment and show, and it plays cunningly on that as the older and younger selves converse and the conscious and the unconscious collide. Just as a great piece of theatre has a dream-like quality, so Stella could be seen as the drug-induced hallucinations of someone trying to make sense of a life lived as a man and a woman and who knows that, when it comes to the final curtain, “you can’t really die as anybody else”.
The time-fluid fragmentary style pays dividends, but risks leaving us in the dark if we are not already familiar with Stella’s story: sensationally tried and acquitted of indecency and then successfully touring variety halls in a drag act until her beauty faded. The cut that the surgeon will make in Ernest’s cancerous throat has its echoes in the lonely fate of Stella’s lover, Arthur, who never contacted her again after her arrest and killed himself rather than face disgrace.
This is as much about the present and our own attitudes to gender fluidity as it is about the past, and it constantly probes what it is that makes us ourselves. Richard Cant captures all of Ernest’s corrosive loneliness, a sharp contrast with the absurd, dizzy optimism of Oscar Batterham’s Stella. It doesn’t quite deliver emotionally, but there are moments when, like Stella herself, this glows brightly.
- At Hoxton Hall, London, until 18 June. Box office: 020-7968 6808.
