Neil Bartlett on an unconventional music-hall pioneer
Have you ever wished you could travel in time? A visit to newly renovated 1863 theatre Hoxton Hall lets you do just that. One minute, you’re on a tatty side street in Hackney, surrounded by kebab shops and cafés. The next, you’re in sumptuous music hall where ordinary Victorian Londoners came to play, flirt, and be entertained. Playwright Neil Bartlett was immediately seduced by Hoxton Hall’s charms: the balcony with its metal railings, the plushy red seats and crystal-clear acoustics – a world away from the vast theatres of the West End. “There’s nothing stuck up about these places,” he says. "There would have been direct access to the bar during the performances, for drinking and talking and smoking ... [and] all rooms had fireplaces, so everyone knew to keep their crinoline out of the way.” It's a perfect setting for his play about infamous music-hall artiste Ernest Boulton, who shocked Victorian Britain with his crossdressing alter-ego, Stella. The size of Hoxton Hall means that performers are never more than 25 feet away from audience members – an intimacy that has fed directly into Bartlett's script. What he's created, he says, is "less a play, more an encounter. You get to meet Stella, and she talks to you about her life, as a contemporary." It was a truly astonishing double life. By day, Ernest Boulton was the well-behaved son of a bank manager. By night: a courtesan, stage performer, even the mistress of a Conservative MP. For Bartlett, Stella demonstrates that Victorian England was never quite as straitlaced as we imagine. She's also, he says, a source of inspiration: "The questions that she asks us never change. Are you living your life, or are you living somebody else's? And how do you summon up the nerve to really live as yourself?" Today, all we have to remember Stella's performances are a few elegantly posed photos. It's impossible to exactly recreate her magic. But over a career spanning 30 years, during which time he's produced a dazzling body of plays, Bartlett has learned to accept theatre's fleeting and fluid nature. "Every piece of work lives twice," he explains. "Once when you’re in the room with it, and then again in your memory. But the art of creating of memorable evening is to embrace, absolutely, the sense that this is happening right here, right now, and then it will be gone forever."