Who is Stella? What is she?

Let’s start (as we should) with the show itself; with what Neil Bartlett chooses to give us.

A man, stage left, our right, sitting on a chair in front of the glorious red velvet curtains of the Theatre Royal. A man in black, sitting perfectly still. He stands, he places a hand under the curtain, and the curtain rises, as if by his magical command, Who is this man? Servant? Master? Magician? Funeral director?

We see a stage within the stage; a kind of large podium. A man (a different one) sits on a chair. This man is middle-aged, besuited and anxious. The stage is black and bare, except for two chairs, a light bulb on a long flex, and a row of lights at the back, off centre, that look like an exaggerated take on those light bulbs you get around the mirrors in dressing rooms.

Ah, mirrors! Mirrors are important to this production. We are told by the anxious sitting man that there are no mirrors here – all the mirrors are covered. We hear the crash of breaking glass, and a narrative as fragmented as a shattered mirror emerges. Waiting for a cab at 7pm. A hand smashing into the glass. A mirror covered with a cloth.

Another person enters. He. She. Ze. They. Take your pick – we live in an age when (although things aren’t perfect) there is at least an option for choosing the pronoun by which you’d like to be known. This person is Stella. Stella has bare legs and arms, and masculine shoulders. Stella has a lovely round and pretty face, fluffy blonde hair, a feminine voice. Stella is wearing a silk gown that is a sort of kimono. She sits, and as she talks, she takes out a hand-held mirror and does her make-up. It’s her birthday. She’s waiting to be collected. She has a lover called Arthur who is not that handsome and a bit nervous and sweaty – but he is rich. Her mother approves. This story is set a hundred years before Marilyn will sing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, but her spirit is channelled here. The light reflected from the mirror in her hand bounces around the stage and auditorium, a fast-moving butterfly fluttering hither and thither.

The two characters on the podium chairs – one constant as young Stella, the other vacillating between a number of voices: the scared aristocratic lover Arthur, who disappears when Stella is arrested; an older Stella reflecting on the past; and Stella’s alter-ego / birth persona Ernest Boulton. Often, the two actors are delivering monologues cleverly intercut so that there are echoes of words and feelings picked up on by the other. Occasionally there is dialogue. Circling around them is the man we first met raising the curtain. In the programme credits he is called The Attendant. He watches. He witnesses. He sometimes brings things to Stella – a pair of shoes, a tray of cosmetics.

Neil Bartlett gives us Stella’s personal story, a specific individual tale of liberation, oppression, and fighting to be seen as who you choose to be, set in the 19th century; yet this is also a kind of playfully anachronistic leap in and out of other times – with the thoughts and words of famous contemporary experimenters with gender and image, including Bette Bourne and Scottee, allowed to inform the script. Yes, things are different now. But we’ve still a way to go.

All three actors are brilliant in their roles. Richard Cant brings age and experience to the stage. He speaks quietly, forcing you to really listen to him. Oscar Batterman, who graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama only last year, is a perfect choice for young Stella. He captures the delicate balance between brash boyish exuberance and girlish coquettishness that Stella plays out, and with, so effectively. David Carr is ideal as the attendant – an efficient and subservient butler, yet somehow also the puppet-master in the background.

I have a conversation with myself about the decision to cast a black actor in this ‘servant’ role. Is it racist of me even to notice? Is there a sub-text about there being other issues of identity and liberation from oppression that will also need to be played out in the 19th and 20th centuries, alongside issues of gender? I think about scrapping this paragraph from this review – but I’ve kept it in, in the interests of honesty, because even now, in the liberated 21st century, when we see bodies on stage, we note that they are ‘male’ or ‘female’ or ‘young’ or ‘old’ or ‘black’ or ‘white’. We do not see neutral bodies. Will we ever?

Stella is written and directed by Neil Bartlett. And if there is one thing you can say about Bartlett, it’s that he knows his stuff. His productions vary wildly in style and form, but what they have in common is the care and precision with which everything is done. Nothing unnecessary is left in. Everything onstage – words, physical action, visual tableaux, lights, sounds – is beautifully executed. He’s never afraid to use stillness, to take his time. A lesson in contemporary dramaturgy.

I think it is fair to say that this is a production where the programme notes are a useful addition to understanding the context of the play. Best read afterwards, of course – but having some information on Ernest Boulton’s biography is helpful to enhance and inform the experience witnessed onstage. But this is extra: the show is complete in itself.

What we are presented with is a story of a shattered life, in which the beautiful Stella, although a victim, shines out brilliantly and soars above her troubles, be they arrest and harassment, abandonment by scared lovers, or the far more mundane but just as nasty experience of losing your good looks as you age, and having to reappraise who you are, and reinvent yourself continuously. There is also the less glamorous but equally interesting story of Arthur, and the choices he makes. His ‘cowardice’ – if we can call it that – as he abandons Stella in her hour of need is hardly to be condemned in the circumstances. He, like Stella, is a victim of oppression.

Wouldn’t it be dreadful if this were a real story, we are asked, onstage numerous times, and in the programme notes. Well, it is…

It is dreadful that such things happened. Heartbreaking. It is also an honour to witness the stories of those who fought the battles that paved the way for the changes in society that our generation is benefitting from. More work to be done, but great leaps have been made – we stand on Stella’s shoulders. A heroine for our times.

Zvizdal, the latest work by Belgian company BERLIN follows in the footsteps of Bonanza, which controversially won a Total Theatre Award, causing consternation to those who considered it to be a documentary film rather than ‘theatre’, as there are no performers (although there are visible artist-technicians). But Bonanza and Zvizdal, which are both in the company’s Holocene series of projects that focus on a city or geographical region, are most definitely theatre in my book, unless you want to call them pieces of time-based live art. Either way – what’s in a name? – the audience and the artists are brought together in a shared space, for a fixed duration of time. The unconventional set-up of the space, and the use of 3-D models and live-feed projection in the pieces cause us to continually re-evaluate our relationship between live and screened action; and between fact and fiction. Most of what we are seeing might be on screen, but the liveness of the event is vital. We are here together to witness this.

We enter the space to see a traverse setting. Two banks of seating facing each other, with an enormous white screen dividing the space, and below the screen three stations – podiums bearing models of a farm in three seasons, a green and vibrant spring/summer scene, a snowy winter landscape, and a brown and withered autumn. A kind of robot camera is poised to wander between the three scenes, and to the side a mixing desk/editing console with two people behind it.

The show starts with an on-screen white-out, and we hear what we assume is a woman speaking to various Russian officials. Her tone is cheery and determined – she is obviously not going to take no for an answer, but is always upbeat and polite. The English subtitles on the blank white screen translate for us: she needs to get a permit to go into The Zone – the area around Chernobyl that was evacuated post-nuclear disaster in 1986, and is now (allegedly) deserted. No, I can’t give you a permit. There are no permits. No one lives there. You can’t go there. Who can give me a permit? Doors open and close, steps are climbed, and eventually she gets her way. Permit granted. The journey has started. The white-out takes on texture, becomes a fuzzy snowy scene, then in a beautiful and startling moment, the screen switches to a vibrant scene of green fields, blossoming flowers, singing birds, and buzzing insects. Welcome to Chernobyl. Zvizdal, to be precise – one of a number of tiny villages within the 30-mile radius of the Chernobyl reactor.

The first shock is the abundance of wildlife. This is no desolate wasteland, it is nature run amok in the absence of farmers and tamers. The second shock is that there are people here, including the subjects of this extraordinary show, a couple in their eighties called Nadia and Petro Opanossovitch Lubenoc. I only know their names from the programme notes. On screen, they refer to each other as Baba (her) and The Old One (him). We first encounter them sitting silently side by side, slapping the flies away. Baba thinks the USA sent over all the flies. She grumbles about her aches and pains. The Old One jokes that he’s too old to run after the girls, but that in any case, he’s always been faithful to his Baba. We see them walking, painfully, around their overgrown farm. They hack at the long grass. They engage in a Beckett-esque circular conversation about whether to plant the potatoes or not. They bemoan the lack of oats, which were too wet to harvest. There is no electricity – they hoe and plough using their own (slowly declining) energy. They have one old lame horse, one skinny cow, a pig, a few chickens, a dog, a cat. There is an ongoing battle about the gate. He keeps leaving it open. She keeps closing it and securing it with wire. Oh God… she says repeatedly, holding her back. There are conversations about their daughter, who doesn’t visit very often. Their daughter wants them to leave Zvizdal and live with her. The Old One is starting to think the daughter might be right. He’s getting too old for the hammering of stakes and the milking and ploughing and harvesting of their meagre crops. But Baba is adamant. The only way they’ll get her out of there is in a coffin.

We visit them over many seasons (BERLIN went to Zvizdal numerous times between 2011 and 2016) and we see them in the midsummer sunshine and in the midwinter snowdrifts. We never see inside their house – that is the contract that the artists have with them. We are taken for a walk around the village. There’s the post office. Closed. And the community centre. Closed, overgrown. And here’s the bus stop – or at least, it was a bus stop when there were buses to stop. There is no television because there is no electricity. There are no phone lines or mobile phone signals. If you’re here, you’re here with no way to contact the rest of the world. It’s not an easy life, but for the old couple it is what they know, so they have refused to be relocated by the government. They were born here, and they will die here.

One one occasion, we are not with the old couple, we are in the car with the BERLIN filmmakers in the middle of a desolate white landscape, trees heaving with the weight of the snow. A number of men in black uniforms signal for the car to stop, and the screen goes to white-out. Then, on comes the camera again and we drive off, leaving soldiers and dogs staring after us. On another occasion it is springtime, May, and a festival day. Baba hails the passing cars, and greets the visitors to the village. A posse of old Baba Yagas in colourful headscarves and yellowing teeth exchange blessings and stories. Then everyone drives off. There will be no more visitors for another year. ‘It was OK when the neighbour was alive,’ says The Old One, wistfully.

There has been so much change. And over the years that we visit them, more things change. The horse, the cow, and the dog die. It is only a matter of time until one or other of the old people die. But who will go first, and what will the other one do then?

Zvizdal takes us right into the heart of the old couple’s story, but cleverly always remind us of the fiction, the theatricality of documentation. The cuts, the screen white-outs. The sudden loud brash music of the soundtrack. The homing in on the 3-D models, so that the ‘real’ scene is replaced onscreen by the ‘toy’ scene. Then there is another layer of artificiality, or playing with reality if you prefer to think of it that way, as the filmed footage and the filming of the model scenes are merged, creating odd onscreen hybrids. Always, we are reminded, this is theatre, this is storytelling. And of course, as is the case in all the best theatre, the Brechtian dissociations that remind us of the artificialities hammer home the truths. By detaching ourselves momentarily, we can take stock, then fall deeper into the tales being told.

It is heartbreaking, astounding, soul-enriching, beautiful work. BERLIN have once again shown us how extraordinary it is to be human; what bizarre and amazing choices human beings make in their lives. They also show is what it means to witness, to truly witness. It is the essence of theatre.

Postscript: there is a coda to the tale that you access online through a code given to you as you leave the theatre. It had me in tears…

Are there any – girls – in the house? Any good little girls? Any poppets, any princesses, any little angels? Or are there any naughty girls out there? Any tittle-tattles or trouble-makers? Well, whoever you are, all of you – let’s have a party! Mrs Mills, that’s what we need. Mrs Mills tinkling the old ivories. Let’s All Go Down the Strand (have a banana). Oh what fun we had!

Are there any – women –in the house? Any foxy ladies? Any b-itches? Any yummy mummies? Any pishy old Susans with trouble downstairs? (Jump, Motherfucker, Jump).

In her previous show, The English Channel, Liz Aggiss asked: Do I please you, or do I please myself? In Slap and Tickle, she doesn’t even bother asking the question, seeking our permission, she just goes for it, doing exactly what she wants, digging deeper into the exploration of her own place in the world as a mature female dancer, and along the way poking and prodding the memes and mores of the stifling post-war British culture that both formed her, and gave her plenty to rebel against. Housewife’s Choice. Listen With Mother. Janet and John. Doris Day.

Slap and Tickle is in three acts, these punctuated with audience participation party games (pass the parcel, and a manic balloon twisting interlude with the voice of Emma Kilbey urging us to spank and bite the balloons) that give her time to change from one extraordinary costume to another. In Act One, her Cinderella phase, she is in silver slippers and a gorgeous old-gold party dress, with a vest and breeches underneath that would do Buttons proud. Act Two sees her resplendent in a dramatic remodelling of the figure-hugging ‘little black dress’ that every grown woman ought to have in her wardrobe.  By Act Three, she’s in a red dress and no knickers, sporting a magnificent horse’s tail (platinum blonde to match her hair) that dances enticingly from her bare bottom as she struts and prances around the stage. Now tell me, is this any way for a woman in her 60s to behave?

The movement work makes use of a vocabulary that will be familiar to Aggiss aficionados. The intense, graphic shapes of early Modernist dance, the old-gold fabric extending and whirling around her a la Loie Fuller. The grotesque body distortions of German Expressionism, Hilde Holger channelled with beautiful precision. The clever (and very funny) play on concealing and revealing the body through costume, which here includes numerous unnerving and/or hilarious headless vignettes, and a marvellous moment in the red dress section when it gets pulled over her head leaving just a Burka-like slit for her eyes. Object play has it’s day, and a lot of it is pretty saucy. Ping pong balls and coins tumble from her nether regions. Cock bunting is unfurled. And there’s ventriloquism of the Ken Campbell variety (i.e. so bad it’s good), as she addresses a battered china doll with the question: What are you afraid of?

There are a lot of words: sharp, sassy spoken words that subvert and ridicule the constant naming and shaming that girls and women endure all through their lives, words that mock the platitudes that keep us under the patriarchal thumb; and sung words, as tunes such as Doris Day’s Que Sera Sera, and Ian Dury’s Reasons to Be Cheerful are deconstructed and reclaimed as (post) feminist anthems. Elsewhere, Doris Day herself also features in the soundtrack, singing A Woman’s Touch, which gives our Liz the opportunity to do a bit of stage cleaning with her trusty cock duster.

It is all totally marvellous – Slap and Tickle feels in some ways like a companion piece to The English Channel, but it also feels like a bringing together of themes, motifs and ideas from many earlier works; a referencing and re-engaging with a fantastic body of performance work by an artist who is going from strength to strength in her seventh decade.

Ultimately, this is a show about female visibility and self-determination. A fabulously funky show that on the 40th anniversary of punk reminds us that perhaps the best feminist rallying cry of all time was Oh Bondage, Up Yours. There’s a place for calm, rational argument – but this isn’t that place. This is a brash and blowsy women’s room with obscenities scrawled on the mirrors in red lipstick, discarded knickers on the floor, and a virtual strap-on waiting to be harnessed. Look John Look / See John See / Janet found her cock / Eventually.

Slideshow is Laurie Anderson on speed. I’ve seen her many times before. I’ve seen the mostly music shows, and I’ve seen the mostly storytelling with some music shows. But this is something else.

Laurie starts, as is her wont, by walking on with her customised electric violin and playing. But on this occasion, it is a short piece, and one of only very few musical interludes in the evening.

As she starts to speak, she is in an oddly naturalistic mode, chatting to us in an informal way, at a pretty fast speed, which is very different to her usual slow and measured performance mode. She tells us that she considered using this occasion to do her first-ever stand-up comedy show, her Plan A, but decided that wasn’t such a good idea as she only knows two jokes. She tells us one of them – and it’s one I’ve heard numerous times before, as it is from Homeland. An elderly couple who can’t stand the sight of each other finally divorce when in their 90s, and people say: Why did you wait so long? Well, they said, we wanted to wait until the children died. Told in a straight-up way, as a stand-up joke, it is has less impact than when delivered in the slow, deep, menacing voice you can hear on Another Day in America, but still – we laughed.

The new, perky, fast-paced Laurie continues at breakneck speed through a phenomenal number of stories. They tumble out of her, as the slides change on the back wall.

A sense of place is what this show is about. Place and places. We race around the world, and occasionally even further afield. There’s Elsinore, in Denmark, where she encounters an ominous sense of unease, and where all her equipment has technical problems, parking a reflection on the need to always have a Plan B. Images of the Egyptian pyramids go with a story of being a teacher who forgets the facts and starts to make things up. See those slits in the pyramids? They are where the sun shines in on one day a year and wakes up the mummies. A picture of Mars pops up, created not by cameras but by transposing into image sound waves bounced from the planet’s surface. There are images of space rockets that accompany a section on her time spent as artist-in-residence at NASA, where she ultimately shied away from creating some sort of technological art-sci piece and instead decided to write a poem (for those of us who saw the show that came out of that residency, we remember that it was a very beautiful poem, delivered on a stage lit by hundreds of tiny nightlights).

There’s a quaint and lovely section using what she calls a ‘pillow speaker’ in her mouth, which enables her to sing like a violin or roar like a lion; and a story of the thing getting glued onto the roof of her mouth. Yep, this is a comedy show, no doubt about it.

A riff on Aristophanes’ The Birds that she has linked in to a reflection on Donald Trump and his Mexican wall doesn’t quite work. She’s racing through it, and she ends up saying ‘go read the play for yourselves.’ Time for joke two, which is about the crucifixion – always good for a laugh. She carries this one off well.

There’s then a shift in mood and tone as we have two pre-existing pieces, familiar from last year’s Brighton Festival show and/or from the film Heart of a Dog; these presented in her hypnotic ‘poet’ voice rather than this new breakneck speed ‘stand-up comedian’ persona. A spine-chilling tale of broken ice and almost-drowned babies; and the marvellous section from the film about a childhood accident that left her in hospital for months, with a fear that she would never walk again. In both these stories, the interplay between her voice, the music, and the moving image, is totally magical.

Following another soulful violin section, played to a projection of trees in the snow, there’s another flurry of places and stories, all of which are unfamiliar to me, so possibly new material, all highly entertaining. A reflection on Thorreau’s Walden Pond (he had a cabin to hole himself up in, but it was close enough to his family house to enable him to nip over for some milk and cookies when he felt the need); a musing on the delights of London’s legendary Marks & Co bookshop (immortalised in 84 Charing Cross Road); a hilarious encounter of a Buddhist group trip down a river in Utah that tested every belief about tolerance and acceptance of other people that she held; and a great story about spending time in an Amish family who were consumed with silent rage and resentment.

A large chunk at the end of the show sees a shift again into lecturer mode, as she reports back on a major ongoing project, creating an installation that forges a direct link between a prison (or specifically, one prisoner) and a cultural centre, the most recent manifestation of which has seen her working with an ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner called Mohammed (pictured with Laurie in the featured image, above).

The show ends, and we realise that somehow two hours have gone by in a flash. It’s difficult to give any sort of critical response to what has been witnessed. It’s a totally mixed bag of performance and lecture and, well yes – stand-up comedy. Some of it works brilliantly, some of it feels like she’s winging it, and it gets a bit messy. It is so different to her usual shows, which are scripted and honed and tweaked until they are perfectly ready for public consumption, that it is a complete surprise. On this occasion, she had notes scribbled on bits of paper; there were quite a lot of ‘ers’ and ‘ums’; and she sometimes encountered technical hitches whilst operating the slides (yes, she was alone on stage and seemed to be doing everything other than the lights herself).

We leave the auditorium with our heads reeling. So many images. So many words. So many ideas. It’ll take a long time to digest all this. I’m sure we will encounter a lot of the new material again, honed into other structures. I loved being witness to this Anderson mash-up. Look out comedy circuit, Laurie Anderson is on your case.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, and as flies they are struck down, one by one. The Richards and the Henries. Antony. Cleopatra. Romeo. Juliet. Lear. Macbeth. Hamlet. And the lesser people, them too. All of them. 23 stabbings, 12 sword fights, 5 poisonings, 12 suicides, 2 throats cut, 1 smothering, 3 natural causes, 4 deaths by wounds, 2 explosions, 2 heartbreaks, 3 mob killings, 2 beatings, 3 miscellaneous.

Oh, you’re thinking, you’re clever to have kept such a detailed tally. Not me, Tim Crouch. His catalogue is listed in the programme notes. ‘Filleting out’ the deaths was the first task he set himself as adaptor/director.

But someone is keeping a live score as well. It’s the nice lady in the neat sweater and secretarial spectacles, sat behind the table to the side of the stage. Ding! And another one bites the dust. Ding ding! Two more gone. End of round 4. The neon numbers clunk down. Gosh, we think at the start – 76! (That’s 75 onstage human deaths plus one black ill favour’d fly from Titus Andronicus.)

Spymonkey’s ‘pompous pedagogue’ Toby Park warns us at the start that we are only getting the onstage deaths. So no Mercutio (groan). No Lady Macbeth (gasp). And no Ophelia (boo). It’s a lively audience tonight. They fight back. Petra Massey is beside herself. She wants to be Ophelia. No Ophelia, Toby repeats. You can guess who gets her way, in the end. But yes – we will get all the onstage deaths, we are promised. Death will have his day.

How on earth will they fit them all in? It’s not a fair game. Some people get disposed of very quickly. Others linger at death’s door for ages. Antony’s death – by his own hand – is the longest in Shakespeare, we learn – 110 lines of it. Not that we get all of them.

Some deaths are big productions. A rollicking great Horse Meat Disco for Richard III. My kingdom for a horse, he cries – even one that looks like it’s escaped from a late-night Glastonbury turbo-rave, all gas masks and latex leggings.

Some deaths are spooky and unnerving: Petra in a nightie dragging a drip around with her, taking care of all the ‘natural causes’ in one fell swoop.

Some deaths are fabulously stupid Spymonkey set-pieces. A ‘Pina McBausch’ Macbeth in translucent kilts (choreographed by Theo Clinkard). And Cleopatra! Petra – of course, who else? – swathed in gold and jade-green lamé, unfurling her great butterfly wings, flapping around the stage with her three gentlemen friends dressed as asps undulating around her. Hats off to other choreographer Janine Fletcher for this truly eccentric dance sequence.

Some deaths come in job-lots. There’s fabulous fisticuffs between fat Spaniard Aitor Basauri (‘I’m not fat, I just look fat.’) and lanky Austrian Stephan Kreiss (‘We are all Kunst.’). Their endless combat becomes a running joke – they pop up hacking away at each other on-stage, off-stage, in the boxes, in the aisles – and as they tussle, another batch of deaths is notched up – 12 swordfights, remember.

The gore fest that is Titus Andronicus sees the clowns being fed one by one into a giant mincemeat machine. Cinna the poet (in Julius Caesar) is a poor wee papery puppet set on a table. The live-feed camera screens him super-sized. It hurts when he’s set on fire. Desdemona’s murder by husband Othello is performed as shadow theatre.

How many’s that, then? No idea, I’ve lost count. At first, I like the neon numbers and the dinging bell. Then they start to annoy me. Then I like them again. Here we all are, waiting for our number to come up. Gods, flies. Yep.

So where’s Tim Crouch in all this? He’s there in the framing, and the questioning, and the juxtaposing, and the stepping out of the action to reflect on the action. He’s there in the meticulous and clever words. More often than not, Toby is his vessel, channeling Crouch-ist reflections on the nature of art, theatre, death, whatever. The Tim Crouch influence is there in the stripped-back operating-theatre aesthetic of the stage set, in the stylised use of tables and microphones, and in the play between live and filmed action. There is a tension between the Crouch approach to theatre-making and the Spymonkey method, but it is a good tension, and it is put to use in the dramaturgy of the show.

Spymonkey seem to have really benefitted from the collaboration. Everyone is on great form, their clown selves doing justice to the challenges thrown them. Aitor in particular has a brilliant show – zipping between the clown set-pieces and a great running gag about his desire to be a proper Shakespearean actor, coached by both Toby and the Bard himself. (Stand with your legs apart! Point a lot! Roll your Rs! Spit!)  All the usual Spymonkey pluses: Toby’s brilliant multi-instrumental music, a deft mix of live and recorded; Lucy Bradbridge’s design skills, the marvellous and outrageously OTT set-piece costumes and props contrasting nicely with the minimalist set and monochrome costumes in other scenes.

It feels a little bit too long, flagging slightly here and there, but these are early days and it will no doubt bed in.

What’s great is how it manages to be simultaneously a fabulously funny clown romp, and a thought-provoking reflection on death’s place within art, and the near-impossibility of portraying death onstage. It is interesting that the one genuinely disturbing death is that of the puppet…