Stella

British director, writer and performer Neil Bartlett will be making his Holland Festival debut with Stella, the story of a life outside of the social mores, a life which could only be a true and full life on the stage. The piece is inspired by one of the strangest scandals of Victorian London.

Ernest Boulton (1848-1904) was a minor music-hall artist who lived and worked as a woman, captivating audiences in and around London with his charm, his beauty  and his sensational frocks. Boulton was completely honest about his sexuality and openly lived with his lover Lord Arthur Clinton, a prominent politician.

In 1869 he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit sodomy – in other words, for daring to appear in public as a homosexual. After a sensational trial – and the tragic death by suicide of his lover – he was acquitted.

Boulton left England and reinvented himself as a cross-dressed burlesque performer in musical theatre, appearing on Broadway. When that career stalled, he returned to the UK and made a third attempt at re-invention by touring as part of a second-rate vaudeville act on the British variety circuit, sometimes credited as a man, sometimes as a woman. Ernest Boulton, aka Lady Arthur Clinton, Mrs W. Graham and Stella, Star of the Strand, died in obscurity and relative poverty in 1904.

With minimal means Bartlett stages a triple tragedy. First, the tragedy of the sudden, unimaginable shock, when Boulton fell overnight from social success and security to arrest and disgrace. Then, the gradual loss of his remarkable good looks and the resulting erosion of his employability. And finally, underneath everything that happened to him,  a more profound disaster; the tragedy of being born in the wrong body. Stella offers an intense, theatrical meditation on age, youth and what it really means to be yourself.

Bartlett first came to prominence in London in the 1980's with a series of controversial solo performances. As well as being a performance artist and an activist within the gay community, he also created controversial work for the National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company and Simon McBurney's theatre group Complicite (who features at this year's Holland Festival with The Encounter). In 1988, he set up the collective company Gloria, together with producer Simon Mellor, composer Nicolas Bloomfield and choreographer Leah Hausman. As well as a performer and stage director, Bartlett is also an acclaimed author.

The writing of Stella was informed by a year of research with cross-dressers and transsexuals living in London, and by Bartlett's private conversations with Ogawa Mitsuharu, better known under his stage name Nakamura Tokizo V, one of Japan's greatest onnagata – the male performers in the kabuki theatre who perform female roles. The piece will also draw on documentary sources –  court records, theatre scripts and personal letters – which will be spiked and intercut with other, more contemporary stories, such as popular “coming out” confessions posted on YouTube and trashy confessional biographies like those of Jayne County and April Ashley.

Like most of Bartlett's work, Stella is about the essence of theatre. Using the simplest of means  –  two actors, two chairs, a handful of costumes and a dense, highly personal text  – he creates a deeply moving story about a man trying to find the courage to be himself. The result is an intense encounter between the audience and Stella, who they meet at two crucial and very different moments in her/his life. Far from being a history lesson, the piece uses Stella's words and body to ask some very personal questions about fear, courage and how to keep your nerve when life turns dangerous.