- This event has passed.
About The Event
Trial of the century. Society outraged. Men dressed as ladies. Or the other way round? Hard to tell these days. These days being 1870.
An explosive new musical retelling of the scandal that rocked the Victorian era, and the two young hell-raisers at the centre of it all.
Fanny and Stella’s legal case (1870-1871) was a significant forerunner to Wilde’s; in fact the legislation that convicted Wilde (Labby’s Amendment) stemmed in part from Fanny and Stella’s controversial acquittal. Coincidentally, they were defended by Mr George Lewis, who went on to defend Queensberry against Wilde. Whatever the legal connections, Wilde was certainly aware of Fanny and Stella, having read about them in The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881). There is even a chance that he met and was influenced by them in his writing. In his book Fanny and Stella, the academic historian Neil McKenna hypothesis that Stella, one of whose aliases was Cecil Graham, may have influenced Wilde’s character of the same name in Lady Windermere’s Fan.