Fanny & Stella, Garden Theatre, review: outdoor theatre returns to London in flamboyant style
Despite being flattened by Covid-19, then steamrollered by the top-down insistence on social distancing, theatre in London is starting to push back through the cracks. Jesus Christ Superstar will open on Friday at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. And that’s the second musical to open in a week.
Second, because pipping the big boys to the post – and marking the first sustained run of a show in the capital since lockdown – is a flamboyant curiosity about an undersung chapter of Victorian life with music by Charles Miller, and book and lyrics by Glenn Chandler, the Scottish writer behind the long-running TV procedural Taggart. Fanny & Stella inaugurates “The Garden Theatre”, a semi-covered al fresco auditorium that currently seats 50, in the backyard of The Eagle pub on Kennington Lane.
It’s an apt location for theatre’s first green shoots. From the late 18th century, Vauxhall’s verdant acres were a byword for pleasure-seeking, nocturnal illuminations and romantic assignations. That activity is history now, but amid today’s urban grime, the flowering of LGBTQ+ venues such as the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and Above the Stag point to a residual air of subversive revelry and sexual freedom.
Fanny & Stella had its premiere at Above the Stag in 2015, something which passed me by – as did a decent body of other theatre work by Chandler, including a play about 1930s exchange visits between the Hitler Youth and the Boy Scouts. And I have to confess, as well, to ignorance of the fascinating subject here: the case of Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, who were arrested in 1870 while leaving the Strand Theatre “in drag” – apparently the first instance of the word entering the public domain – and charged with conspiracy to “commit sodomy”.
In a court battle that prefigured Oscar Wilde’s downfall 25 years later, the Boulton and Park case proved a cause célèbre for polite yet prurient Victorian society. As with Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, the habitually cross-dressing friends – who fashioned a living through their stage appearances together – drew their aristocratic connections into the limelight. Boulton, who went by the soubriquet “Stella”, counted among his lovers Lord Arthur Clinton, the Liberal MP for Newark. The latter, who also acted with the pair, died before the case came to court – and while Boulton and Park were eventually acquitted, the jury is still out as to whether he killed himself.
The evening is as far from the gruff machismo and the heavy-duty seriousness of Taggart as it’s possible to get. At a lean 80 minutes, Fanny & Stella re-lives this salient footnote in gay culture through a carnivalesque round of music-hall ditties and camp repartee. With conspiratorial aplomb, a youthfully limber and feminine Jed Berry (Stella) and Kane Verrall (Fanny) caper in high-heel boots on the decking, before a miniature, velvet-curtained proscenium stage; they flounce their petticoats within inches of the socially-distanced audience’s dutifully masked faces. It’s a shame the actors can’t see our smiles.
Chandler’s wit isn’t razor-sharp: there are as many salacious innuendos as Julian Clary, their equal in eye-shadow, would stuff into the Palladium panto; a typical song title is “Has Anyone Seen My Fanny?” But it’s all droll, perky fun. Even so, shouldn’t more pain be laid bare? The humiliating medical examination to which police subjected Boulton and Parks is a lewdly mimed romp, and while the confusion of Stella’s straight-acting lover Louis (Alex Lodge) is nicely caught, as is the disapproval of Park’s pater (Kurt Kansley) the pair’s spirited defiance feels unwaveringly one-note.
Still, perhaps we all need a bit of that defiance right now. Yes, I think we do.
Until August 25. Info: fannyandstellamusical.com
