Stella

Neil Bartlett is a remarkable talent and his work is always fascinating and thought provoking, whether it its fiction or drama, whether based on history or invention and whether that invention is his own or indeed taken from another source as in his remarkable production of Oliver Twist. This time the source is history, but from it he has created a work of theatre as intensely powerful as his Oliver Twist. Ernest Boulton was Stella, a man being a woman, performing as a woman and often living as a woman. Stella is arrested, sent to trial, but this is not the core of Bartlett’s story, although it is of course an important fact. This is more a play about one person’s struggle to discover their identity and then live that identity – no matter how difficult that may be. It’s a play about the fragility of identity, the fine lines that are drawn by society but also the fine lines that we draw for ourselves.
Bartlett adopts a clever conceit to create this fragility by using two actors to play Stella, one younger and one older, and the play is a brilliant monologue delivered as dialogue. A conversation between the younger and the older, a probing, questioning discourse that allows Stella to come to life in a way that one player would not be able to do.
Richard Cant plays ‘One’, the older Stella, now in male attire. His is a breathtakingly sensitive performance of real skill, delicately powerful. Oscar Batterham plays ‘Two’, the brasher Stella preparing to take on the full female persona, but still there is that brittle fragility masked by a youthful bravura and again beautifully played.
Bartlett always assembles a fine team of creatives to produce his work and for Stella a stellar team have created a visual and aural treat that made this one of my highlights in the 2016 Brighton Festival.
28 May
Theatre Royal Brighton
Andrew Kay
5 stars