What’s the total kiss of death to even the fiercest drag queens? Try audience indifference, darlings – no queen alive survives the mass glazing of utterly bored eyeballs! It’s a killer conundrum even more damaging for drag sex-workers – what hope’s left when even bog-standard looks wither and die and punters stop paying? Frankly, no amount of slap imaginable combats the sexual invisibility of increasing age, as uninterested eyes slide past but never, ever linger!
So pity poor Stella, the true-life, joint Victorian diva and escort celebrated in Neil Bartlett’s latest excavation of hidden gay history. Arrested in full drag at a West End theatre with her friend Fanny, Stella was charged with procuring sodomy for profit in a sensational trial.
But in a twist worthy of Tim Burton’s demented, Alice in Wonderland, Stella was acquitted – the jury couldn’t even imagine having anal sex for kicks!
Poor Victorian England – psychologically, it was a kink-free wasteland, with a deluded Queen Victoria staying wilfully ignorant of scissor sisters indulging lesbian lusts.
But if an insanely repressed middle class dismissed any slightest hint of sex as ‘beastliness’, the upper and lower classes adored pure filth. I mean, come on – who’d really yawn through Church on Sundays and endure prissy, domestic torture when hot cocks in frocks blatantly minced on stage?
No wonder music-halls doubled as perfect stalking-grounds for gin-palace prozzies – theatre and whores were as perfect a marriage as penises and spit-roasts. So, quite fittingly, Stella is running in Hoxton Hall, London’s last surviving, vintage music hall.
Tall, narrow and eerily claustrophobic, even the stage barely has room to breathe, and it’s no stretch to imagine Victorian oiks agog at the insolent beauty of a prick-teasing queen in silks. But, like sex itself, Stella is a slow, teasing reveal to ultimate mystery, beginning with a gaunt, middle-aged actor in character on stage as we enter.
The atmosphere’s tense, electric, more thrilling than a first, unseen kiss of an eager Johnson in a freshly-entered glory-hole. Instantly, we feel a toxic humidity reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’ fatally blooming madwomen, as this older Stella – Richard Cant – touchingly exposes her bittersweet revelations.
Typically – with blatant, trans-genre genius – Bartlett’s script sticks an immediate finger in multiple pies, blending melodrama, police procedural and true confession. Yes, it’s CSI meets Ru Paul’s drag-race, as Bartlett, invariably, treats gay sex with the besotted reverence of an involuntary convert to an unsuspected religion.
But there’s much more to Stella than delirious intoxication with her tragically impermanent glamour. A ‘one-man show for two bodies,’ the play cross-cuts ferociously between Stella’s older and younger selves with the whiplash, cinematic brilliance of prime, coke-fuelled Scorsese.
If aged Stella laments her decreasing beauty and decreasing admirers, ditzy ingénue Stella – bewitchingly played by Oscar Batterham – basks incandescent in her punters’ sexual frenzies. Screw dumb exposition – Bartlett skewers more emotion in this dazzling, 60-minute montage than Coronation Street in 60 years!
Partly, that’s down to virtuoso theatricality. Stella, initially, begins with a thundering knock at a private door, a sharp metaphor for intrusive bigotry. But author Bartlett’s eloquent indictment of social erasure isn’t confined to gay, gender-variant Stella.
Leaving no stone of past, intersectional prejudice unturned, an unspeaking, black actor – David Carr – moves onstage as a second, excluded power behind England’s exploitative throne. A raw, still bleeding political wound, it’s a masterstroke that lifts Stella from fluffy diversion to scathing, social critique.
Gee, what’s not to like? Quite magnificently, Bartlett’s fused the forbidden thrills of Catholic confession – telling intimate secrets to a stranger on your knees in a darkened box(!) – to a sense of theatre as grand, community closure and public exorcism.
Finally, Stella’s fabulously improbable legacy – dragging up whatever the cost – has received the posthumous acclaim it so seductively demands!
• Stella by Neil Bartlett @ Hoxton Hall to June 18th. 0207-684-0060.
