Stella Baker
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Stella Baker (born July 22nd, 1966 in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire) is a British playwright and theatre director.
Being a transgendered female, she is the first British playwright who started her career as a male (formerly known as Mark Bates) and continues her career as a female. She is known for her work in comedy and also for her work in drama.
She started writing in 1989, and events which happened around this time in Europe led to her fascination with Eastern Europe. She visited the Soviet Union during its fall but finally settled in Poland in 1993. In 1994 whilst working as a lecturer at Poznan University she established The Poznan Fringe Theatre Company, working to introduce the concept of fringe theatre to Polish theatre. Her first play No Place Like Home did not attract much attention when it was staged in February 1995, but she immediately won critical acclaim with the staging of her comedy entitled Peanuts, about the revaluation of the Polish zloty and the country’s transition from communism to the current political system. In 1996 she staged another comedy entitled The Visit From Strangers about two Martians who came to Earth but failed to find any sign of intelligent life. Between 1997 and 1999 she turned her attention to drama staging At The Bus Stop and One Saturday in 1998 with repeat performances of Peanuts throughout from 1996 to 1999.
In 1997 she was commissioned to write a film script for the Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, a project which never took off due to the fact that Kieslowski died near the start of the project.
From the very start she established her own style of working in Polish theatre. Her one act plays were almost always staged in two language versions, both in Polish and English, and in 1998 she abandoned the stage and working in theatre in favour of staging her plays in pubs, clubs, cultural centres and art galleries. This started a trend among smaller theatres in Poland, who also began staging performances in English (as well as Polish) and also perfoming at venues outside theatres. At the International MALTA Festival of Theatre in Poznan in 2000 her performance of One Saturday staged in a pub attracted an audience of nearly six hundred people, and the Polish national newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza started to suggest that she was the future of Polish theatre.
In 2001 she left Poznan for Warsaw, staging what is seen as one of the finest ever comedies in Polish theatre The Scottish Patient (English version titled The Italian Patient) a comedy about health service reforms. This play ran for a whole season to packed audiences, being extremely popular among Warsaw teenagers, and is still remembered by many of Warsaw’s theatregoers even today. Her most controversial work was staged at the Metro Theatre in Warsaw in 2003, including dramas such as Rejected about the sexual harassment of women at work, a newer version of One Saturday, which focussed on domestic violence. Both productions divided Warsaw theatregoers and a planned production of Sunday - about the splitting up of two homosexual priests, caused such an outcry that the production had to be abandoned and she lost her position at the theatre.
She is known as being a specialist in writing dialogues, and in a review on Rejected the critics at Gazeta Wyborcza wrote that the play “featured dialogues never heard before on a Polish stage”. But not even a revamped version of Peanuts, which was retitled Cabbages and transformed into a comedy about the introduction of the Euro saved her from a period in the theatrical wilderness where nobody in Polish theatre wanted to work with her. She also had gender issues and shunned media attention and publicity as she was still publicly male, but living privately as a woman.
In 2005 she wrote new plays, including The Condemned about a love triangle between a Wehrmacht soldier, a Jewish woman and a Polish woman working for the resistance in 1944 Warsaw, Payday which is a comedy about reality TV, and she combined versions of Rejected and One Saturday into a new drama called Once. She also moved to a smaller Polish town, Zywiec and started a new theatre, staging Cabbages. This production of the play, which is seen as her most popular play, caused Gazeta Wyborcza to write that she succeeded in introducing fringe theatre to Poland and through this achieved something that Jerzy Grotowski failed to do, which was find a new direction in theatre.
However she was troubled by the conflict between her private life as a woman and public life as a male, and after a period of avoiding publicity and media attention issued a statement where she publicly declared that she was a transsexual and wished to be further known as Stella Baker. This caused a certain amount of shock, so much that she had to abandon her production of a new play called Death and return to Britain.
She is currently developing a theatre in London called ‘Q’ and working on a new version of Cabbages to be staged in London towards the end of 2006.
