Neil Bartlett’s two-hander (technically a three-hander) is a complex meditation on gender and identity. It’s based on the life of Victorian cross-dresser Stella (born Ernest) Boulton who survived a scandalous court case and went on to have a successful career as a female impersonator.
Bartlett’s text for the piece is very dense with allusions, ruminations and symbolism on the theme of gender and performance. So much so that I think a very interesting biography gets somewhat lost. From the play I got a vague impression of a few drag shows and a bit of prostitution, but Bartlett’s interview in the Latest shows that Stella’s career was more, well, stellar. I certainly wish I’d read it before seeing the show as then knowing the main facts of the case I could just enjoy the brilliantly realised character of Stella herself.
The heroine of the piece is presented by two performers: Oscar Batterham is Stella at twenty-one, and Richard Cant is Stella living in straitened circumstances, dying of cancer and waiting for a taxi to take her to hospital – a journey from which she knows she will not return. Both actors share both a physicality and emotional core which makes the audience see them both as the same person. Batterham, the beautiful youth, is flirty but also fiercely angry at the many injustices she suffers at the hands of lovers, the police and large portions of society.
Cant gives one of the most remarkable performances I’ve ever seen. He gives the fullest possible representation of a living, breathing Victorian; without being showy or ‘acting’, everything he says, every gesture goes towards summoning up this vastly complex character. Dressed in male clothes – as Bartlett explains it was the only way Stella could get hospital treatment – Cant is by turns fragile, imperious, angry, dignified and perhaps a little mad. Or maybe it’s the opiates Stella is taking for the pain. There are parts of the evening that are truly heartbreaking. When he talks about a lover having possessed “the last hands ever to touch me” it’s presented so matter of factly that it becomes more devastating than any show of maudlin sentimentality.
The third character is referred to in the programme as The Attendant (David Carr). He is a shaven-headed black man wearing a modern suit who observes the two Stellas as they speak. Who, or what, he represents is beyond the powers of my intellect to fathom.
I’d recommend Stella to everyone. It’s intelligent, literate, it’s also funny – I hope I’ve not portrayed it as some kind of Gender Studies lecture as it certainly isn’t. But it really has to be seen for its spellbinding central performance.
Continues at Hoxton Hall from Jun 1 –Jun 18.
For interview with Neil Bartlett, click here.
For more details and tickets, click here.