Fanny and Stella were theatrical creations that got out of hand. These two alter egos were created by well-heeled young gay men in 1870s London for first a fancy dress ball, then dire-sounding melodramatic entertainments, then filled with a life of their own. This musical sets a polished but somewhat brittle lens on the gay demi monde of Victorian London, reflecting its pleasures while proving that the era’s prudish morality came down harshest on anyone in petticoats, male or female.
We first see Fanny and Stella bickering over the plum roles in second-rate theatricals. Playwright Glenn Chandler’s strategy for turning their story from a historical footnote to a fleshier drama is to have the two cross-dressing men tell it themselves. The audience are cast as a rough Working Men’s Club audience, in a meta-theatrical twist that does plenty to highlight the pair’s love of the limelight, but less to make us love them. As Chandler’s own essay in the programme notes, they were essentially amateurs whose ropey performances were paeans to a stage that hadn’t quite yet worked out how to accommodate them. Come morning, Fanny peeled off her frock to go to work as Ernest the office clerk – Robert Jeffrey plays the role as one step away from lip-wobbling petulance, brilliantly able to manipulate three separate male lovers into supporting his vastly eccentric frock habit. The most prominent of them is Lord Arthur Clinton, a standard issue hapless fop who James Robert-Moore makes pitiable, as well as laughable, as he goes bankrupt over silken petticoats.
Director Steven Dexter deftly handles the actors’ constant shifts as they become a whole playbill’s length of characters, encountered on a tour London’s lively night life. The two wardrobe doors in designer David Shields’ woodpanelled delight of a set keep the momentum going as they swing to let in a stream of dressing room antics. But Chandler’s text falls short, with a dour focus on the two men’s more unlikeable habit of draining the pockets of men willing to support their lifestyle. Their brittle dialogue emphasises the dullness of a society that falls short of their sparkling imagined world: “What about the Scottish Enlightenment?” “They haven’t turned it on yet.” Their mirth, we quickly realise, relies on money, status, and a corresponding social snobbery which allows almost everyone around them to dismiss their moral qualms. The almost is proved by Phil Sealey’s Mr Grimes, who takes the role of Jean Valjean’s relentless pursuer in the Les Miserables with stolid, hilarious vigour, but does little to depress his quarry’s spirits in the process.
The point is proved in the rather livelier second act, where William’s High Court judge father secures them certiorari – the kind of civil trial reserved for the wealthy or the miscreant sons of the aristocracy. A whole slew of legal terminology makes for a surprisingly lively musical number that still leaves room for the moral ambiguitiea involved: as Eric rejoices, it is a victory – but as everyone else is all too aware, at the cost of their jobs and reputations.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that playwright Glenn Chandler is running off steam after Taggart’s dourness with this headspinning outbreak of whimsy – sadly not always as infectious as the venereal disease which saw off both Fanny and Stella. But the polite laughter strengthened into guffaws under the influence of large doses of cock jokes: truncheons and alleys are pressed into service. And the ensemble numbers bolster voices that falter on their own into a more muscular kind of fun. Sodomy on the Strand goes some way capturing the attraction of a cross-dressing lifestyle that met with danger and disapproval at every turn.
Elsewhere, Chandler’s studiedly meta-theatrical approach makes it hard to be swept along in the social whirl of theatrical Victorian London. Fanny and Stella are determinedly frivolous, but their bubble is burst in a production that skewers their pretensions as much as it celebrates them.
