"Stella" (Hoxton Hall, 2 June)

This didn't so much transcend as apothesise what had previously seemed to me cliches about Victorian homosexuality. A play about a nineteenth-century trans performer dying of cancer, this piece did about what you would think it would do: depict the fleeting glories and shattering late-life choices available to sexual minorities in a rigidly conformist society. And yet I think this was more-or-less perfect: consistently startling, whether in its choice of language (comparing a shattering face with the sound of feet on snow) or in its thematic invocation of furniture-clogged, heavily interior nineteenth-century domestic life. Days on, I still feel faintly claustrophobic. 

That this piece was set in an extant music hall was also, essentially, perfect, putting as it did queer nineteenth-century private life on stage in what would have been this most surface-heavy of nineteenth-century environments. This is how we understand the nineteenth century now: as a surface we no longer really believe in, underneath which is what we understand as "real" nineteenth-century life, buried sexuality, pain, and violence against minorities. Without in any sense diminishing the heavy horror of that world, "Stella" showed its fleeting (its hard, gem-like?) pleasures. Again, a cliche--but a cliche given startling life by tremendous acting, stagecraft--and, yes, research. 

I was reminded of Alison Winter's History of Science class, eons ago at Chicago, and a discussion of the way anaesthetic opened up the body for exploration, even as the pre-germ theory state of things made such explorations potentially horrific. The piece's exploration of the metaphysics of being in other bodies was, again, maybe nothing new--but perfectly executed, echoing with startling contrasts. A body on stage, heading for a Victorian cancer surgery it had no expectation of surviving, will survive in my memory for a long time.