Fanny & Stella – The Shocking True Story – Above the Stag Theatre

Picture: PBGstudios

Fanny & Stella – The Shocking True Story continues at Above the Stag Theatre, London until 2 June 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

This rewritten and restaged revival from 2015 throws us into the story of Fanny & Stella, the stage aliases of William Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, opening with a chorus of ‘Sodomy on the Strand’.

Fanny and Stella are at the Bermondsey Working Men’s Club to enact the story of their trial and acquittal. Born into comfortable middle-class homes, they tell us of their love for childhood amateur theatricals, playing the female roles.

Rejecting the respectable professions of law and banking expected of them, they spend their days dressed as women both on and off the stage, frequenting both gay and straight establishments in the pursuit of sex.

Liaisons with Lord Arthur Clinton, John Safford Fiske (the American Consul in Edinburgh) and Louis Charles Hurt were a part of their lives, some of their lovers encouraging them to try and appear straight and masculine, some preferring them dressed as women.

Glenn Chandler, best known as the creator of TV detective Taggart, has written a book and lyrics that are a rollercoaster ride, capturing the risks that Stella and Fanny and their suitors took in an era where their activities risked imprisonment.

It’s very funny, though it skates over the more sordid aspects of their lives. Both died of ‘unmentionable diseases’. Music by Charles Miller is matched to the era, not particularly memorable, but bouncy and infective with the occasional hint of Gilbert and Sullivan. Innuendo abounds as in Fanny’s lament as her mother, ‘Has Anyone Seen My Fanny?’ 

The staging and direction by Steven Dexter with choreography by Carole Todd is tight and inventive. It’s very physical with stylised use of gesture perfectly pitched.

The handsome set by David Shields places two large wardrobes on either side of the stage, used amusingly for the many entrances and exits and costume changes. Mention must be made of sound designer Nico Menghini. The amplification is so subtle that initially I thought the performers were unmiked, beautifully balancing the voices with MD Aaron Clingham’s piano accompaniment.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Mark Pearce is wonderfully funny, making the most of an entrance or exit, switching effortlessly between Narrator and an East Ender, a Scottish landlady and an English copper who brings Fanny and Stella to trial.

Tom Mann, Christian Andrews and Blair Robertson play the masculine suitors and much else with style and conviction.  As Fanny and Stella, Tobias Charles and Kieran Parrot are delightful, at times seeming like a younger Hinge and Bracket as they bicker, capturing their female personas convincingly, with just a trace of their femininity remaining when in their male selves.

The whole evening is a hugely entertaining romp, though Chandler’s book does introduce a note of seriousness at the end, with the suitors contemplating the ruin of their lives after public exposure and Stella commenting that he hopes that it won’t take a century for society to stop criminalising them. It’s an Off-West End production with West End production values and performances and well worth seeing in this attractive and very comfortable space under the Vauxhall Railway Arches.

Leon Ferguson