Stella Jones, Bird-of-Prey Milk No. 13

Interviewed by Annelise Myrtle

for Secretary Press, Issue 13, Summer 2026

[This interview is an extract of the novel-in-construction Bramble, ER, of which Stella & Annelise are characters.]

Stella Jones was born in 1993, in Rio, Brazil, but little to nothing is known about her upbringing, education and earlier work, and also she wouldn’t tell me. Based in the East End of London since 2020, the playwright and actress has been consistently—well for about a year now—working on a series of plays titled Nights and Works, a set of monodramas staged by herself at the Wild Palms pub every other Sunday. The enigmatically advertised spectacle—a few times had I walked past the vague (to say the least) flyer, glued to some well specifically dramatic light posts along the Thames Walk’s north-bank before I’d finally decided to examine it further—the enigmatically advertised spectacle isn’t any less enigmatic in its deliverance. And after I’d watched seven or eight different shows of the series, I went on to approach Stella, ‘Pleased to meet you: supernatural detective Annelise Myrtle,’ knowing that I’d give her a fright or at least give her goose pumps and I did, such is her Latin complexion and superstition, and then I laughed, asking at last if I could interview her for the literary supplement I work for, which calmed down the mare in her name. And Stella seemed to be waiting for it, yes very much as if she knew it was coming, ‘I’m always expecting to be arrested by the wind’ she was saying. So it was only few days after that that the following conversation took place, time, round a wheelbarrow table at a river side pub, on the evening of the longest day of the year, twilight.

MYRTLE

Stella, why is it you expect to be arrested by the wind? What do you assume your crime to be?

JONES

It’s because of my resistance to the living conditions of death, my constant flee from the organic farewell-machine, even though I resist and I flee just as a child would, playing, only half-afraid because she’s always knowing she’ll be caught, and torn apart, while the wind is saying mutely, I quote: ‘If Beauty dreamt is larger than the lived, tell me: you don’t want to be, or you don’t know yourself to be a dream?’ You know—air itself has no sound, it’s only when it moves against something that we can hear it. While as for feeling it, even if silently: it is against the I that it is crashing. Only it isn’t stopping for me. But you, you stopped for me.

MYRTLE

Not for long, my dear, or not for ever. To my eyes and to my ears, the words Beauty and Dream seem to be the major and minor keys in your solitary drama. I’m no music theorist, but I do listen to a lot of jazz. Am I right to single out these two pillars within your Works and Nights construction?

JONES

And I’m no musician, so I don’t really know what you mean, but no I do, yes, sure, happy-sad, white or black, but no, alive and dead…—Well on this I’m gonna have to quote the Brazilian poet Cecilia Meireles again: ‘I feel no joy nor torment. / I cross nights and days / In the wind.’

MYRTLE

So you are well behaved after all. Get out of bramble-prison, then: and answer my question?

JONES

Okay. [Stella takes a sip of her wine, for the first time now since we’d sat down.] In the plays, if the Dream is melancholy or brooding it’s because it is so anchored in the self, in the mirages which compose the self. The dream will mirror all the thoughts-images I’m attached to, through which I’d conditioned my identity in the past, always in the past, even when these images are wishing for something in the future, always in the future. But then the Beauty that is suddenly revealed when the Dream dissolves, that Beauty is selfless and is seen always now, dead or alive. You may have thought beauty to be subjective, personal, that it could be possessed. But even when the actress dresses up all beautifully, it is objectively that she is beautiful, it is always the Other that is beautiful, the I don’t exist. And I can’t be possessed either. When I look at the most beautiful flower, again I don’t exist. And even if I cut its stem and bring it home and put it in a vase, or if I kiss it and take it to bed, even if I try to identify with it and call it my flower, call you my flower, Myrtle, well I possess nothing but trouble, and then I’m dreaming again and then I’m despairingly sad. But if only I just see it, the real relations that make for beauty, which is truth, then I don’t dream and then it is all beautiful, and I have nothing to do with it, and finally what I tell you from that place isn’t mine to tell either, but ours—although I’ll tell you it in ‘my own’ strange way which is simply the way I had to go about in my investigating it…

MYRTLE

And that’s when the characterless character in the play finally breaks into song, I gather?

JONES

Something like that, I don’t think.

MYRTLE

So you’re enacting a plot composed of mirages, and the different masks you’re wearing are the socially conditioned identities you’ve identified with, like the Aristocratic Madame and the Street Boy, for example, and then this riddle-like scenario crumbles into…—Why jazz? I mean I know you’ve subtitled the series ‘jazz plays’, and I gather they’re more or less improvised acts, but on at least two of the shows I’ve seen so far, the music didn’t ever come up—apart from your anonymous pianist caressing a few keys here and there, and then those three starling puppets which seem to regurgitate parts of your speech: what’s up with them all, anyway?

JONES

If the confusion remains confused, if no natural order shows, if the spontaneous speech doesn’t get to the root of the situation and we’d know if it did because then all the elements would be related and then there’d be no subject who’s dreaming but only facts existing, if all that doesn’t happen, then no impossible voice is possible. The impossible voice, which would have come otherwise, is not mine. Have you ever walked up to a bird’s nest, or to a congregation of birds chattering inside of a hedge, only for them to shut up having noticed your presence? I can’t be there. But yes—jazz is not a what, but a how, Bill Evans said that. The plays are a spontaneous mental process even though the instruments—the images or the characters—are already there. And then of course there are no wrongs notes or doings: anything must be justified by the next gesture or word, causing the unexpected error to make sense…—But if they don’t lead to the selflessness of the starlings, who are just simply responding, relating, then I can’t sing, because I can’t sing. I mean, if I can’t respond to the invisible pianist and to the starlings holistically, if I can’t be equal to life, then I’m equal to death and that’s also fine, at times. What I still haven’t seen, however, is life and death equalizing each other…—At least not at the Wild Palms stage. But then, as the great Stella Adler said, ‘The Russians kiss you and die for you by really doing it, not by talking. Somebody coming in from stormy weather has a cloak. You help her off with it. You don’t just kiss her hand and wait for your cue.’—Except I’m Latin American, but not only: so how do I die for you, for me? Well, I don’t know, but anyway I have a clue. It was Stella who said also: ‘The most important thing an actor has to work on is his mind.’ And also, finally: that the word Theatre comes from the Greeks, meaning the Seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. So with these clues…

MYRTLE

I take the cue: you obliterate yourself, whoever you are with your specificities, whoever I is…

JONES

And with it, psychological time. The I starts the clock, moves it about like a mirage. Either the I is crazy with the illusion of power, since the only thing it is moving about is an illusion, or else it doesn’t even realize it’s doing it, or trying to do it, and gets all brambled by it. The thing is: it doesn’t have to do it. So when the objective Eye sees the clock, then they both dissolve… Like the bee fertilizes the flower it robs? I don’t know what I mean here, but I also do know it. It was Chris Marker, the master of camouflage, who said it: ‘All I have to offer is myself.’

MYRTLE

And what about the fact that you’re the playwright, how do you improvise what you yourself had written, how do you avoid controlling it? What exactly have you written?

JONES

I don’t write it, I have the dreams. It’s in their memory that I enact, and in exposing them fully that I may, perhaps, one day, reach…—Something like the Immemory.

MYRTLE

I’ll get back to that in a minute. But before I forget: what are those three starlings doing?

JONES

Ah, they’re just fooling around with my time. With psychological time, that is, which for them don’t exist. They’re just making fun of me, in a way. They echo, they delay, and they reverb.

MYRTLE

Alright... To end this with, Stella, at least for the time being, [I’d already forgotten it], tell me: Thorn bending to honeysuckle or honeysuckle bending to thorn?

JONES

You ask what my flowers say—then they were disobedient—I gave them messages. They said what the lips in the West say when the sun goes down, and so says the Dawn.