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.

There are certain times of our lives whose intensity feels formative. Or perhaps it’s because so much of our selves are being forged in those moments that their experience is searing. The turning point at the end of school before moving on to – who knowns what, exactly? – but ‘adulthood’, is one of those times. Everything is changing, everything is charged – it makes for highly sympathetic art and Alan Warner’s Scottish novel The Sopranos creates six hugely memorable characters whose vibrant, chaotic grab for life on the cusp of leaving school is immensely identifiable at the same time as being utterly extreme.

Lee Hall’s adaptation in this NTS / Live Theatre co-production still bears some of the hallmarks of its source material. There’s a novelistic turn to the dramaturgy whose structure is diffuse and episodic, following each of our protagonists to the very end of each of their narratives. To tell this tale of Scottish-choirgirls-gone-bad through song however, with a score that stretches from the liturgical to the progressive, is a brilliant decision. All the heart and energy that makes the characters leap from the page translates into a pure and show-stopping quality of performance. The deliciously scabrous back wall of Chloe Lamford’s set vividly articulates the poverty and oppressive religiosity the girls are – one way or another – escaping. Elsewhere, Vicki Featherstone’s lean direction places a picaresque cast of characters, almost entirely men, in the gift of her cast of six girls to recreate. Lovely clear and comic physical performance brings to life a world of the lecherous, drunk, and plain stupid, and this styling – of the world entirely created by the girls – also creates the sense that these women, for all the challenges they face, might yet be mistresses of their destinies.

It’s all here – love, death, sex, theft, arson, and a helluva lot of booze. The production smacks of the high production and performance quality you would expect from the National Theatre of Scotland, and, if the storytelling is sometime is a bit baggy, the energy and charm of characters and performers in their memorable multiroling style more than makes up for it.

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…