Fanny & Stella at the Garden Theatre

The experience of live theatre might just feel like a thing from the dim and distant past ...

But it's about to cautiously edge back into our lives with the imminent arrival of the acclaimed musical Fanny & Stella which will be staged as the premiere production in the Garden Theatre in the recently renovated garden of The Eagle in Kennington Lane.

Suitably for our current circumstances, perhaps, the show tells a historical story.

Ernest Park and Frederick Boulton were young men who, in 1871, were put on trial in London for dressing as women and conspiring to commit sodomy - a criminal offence at the time.

They dressed up as women (and were very good at it) for amateur theatricals, but when the show was over, and sometimes when there wasn't even any show, as 'Fanny and Stella' they would frequent places of entertainment in the West End where men encountered men for sex and male prostitutes plied their trade.

Park and Boulton were acquitted - an amazing victory for the time when sexual acts between men carried a sentence of two years - perhaps it was because one had a father who was a judge, and the other a mother who swayed the court with her tears.

This socially distanced, open-air show is produced by Peter Bull for Lambco Productions and directed by Steven Dexter, with Jed Berry as Ernest Boulton/Stella and Kane Verrall as Frederick William Park/Fanny.

Jed Berry (left) and Kane Verrall

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