Laura Wade’s plays include Posh (Royal Court Theatre and West End), Alice (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield), Kreutzer vs. Kreutzer (Globe Theatre, Sydney Opera House and Australian tour), Other Hands (Soho Theatre), Colder Than Here (Soho Theatre and MCC Theatre New York), Breathing Corpses (Royal Court Theatre), Catch (Royal Court Theatre, written with four other playwrights), Young Emma (Finborough Theatre), 16 Winters (Bristol Old Vic Basement) and Limbo (Crucible Studio Theatre, Sheffield). Films include The Riot Club. Awards include the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Pearson Best Play Award and the George Devine Award. Laura Wade’s plays have been performed in the UK, USA, Australia, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.
Tipping the Velvet
Paperback
- ISBN-13: 9781783199952
- Publisher: Oberon Books
- Publication date: 09/27/2016
- Pages: 126
- Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d)
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It's 1887 and Nancy Astley sits in the audience at her local music hall: she doesn't know it yet, but the next act on the bill will change her life. Tonight is the night she'll fall in love . . . with the thrill of the stage and with Kitty Butler, a girl who wears trousers. Adapted by acclaimed playwright Laura Wade from Sarah Waters' audacious bestselling novel.
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Intrigued by this attractive young woman who dresses, dances, and sings "as a feller," Nancy returns to the music hall several more times, finally catching Miss Butler's attention. A friendship quickly develops and before long, Nancy has become Kitty's dresser, helping her to change costumes between acts. Though Nancy is keenly aware of her desire to make her relationship with Kitty more than mere friendship, she bides her time, unsure of Kitty's own preference.
When a talent agent discovers Kitty and offers her a debut in the London theater district, Nancy's role as Kitty's dresser becomes official and, at Kitty's invitation, Nancy tags along. The two girls are mesmerized by the bright lights and city life, and when Nancy eventually joins the act as a second male impersonator with the stage name Nan King, both their professional and their sexual lives soar to new heights.
But Kitty isn't comfortable with her life as a Tom, and in an effort to hide her true sexuality, she decides to closet herself by agreeing to marry her male agent and abruptly ending her relationship with Nan. Brokenhearted and devastated, Nan blunders off in a depressive funk, taking nothing but a little money and her stage costumes with her. With no means of generating any income, Nan dons her male persona and hits the streets to make a living as a "renter," providing oral sex to men who take her for a boy prostitute.
For a while Nan accepts the daily degradations, but eventually it starts to wear on her. Just as she feels she has reached the lowest point in her life, salvation arrives in the form of one Diana Lethaby, a rich widow with a voracious and somewhat twisted sexual appetite. When Diana invites Nan to become her live-in girl-toy, Nan jumps at the chance. For the next year or so, Nan willingly gives up any semblance of independence in exchange for a life of decadent sex and opulent luxury, the likes of which she has never known.
It doesn't last, however, and in fact disappears in the blink of an eye when Diana tosses Nan out into the street over a sexual transgression. Destitute and desperate, Nan manages to seek out the home of social worker Florence Banner, a woman Nan met briefly just before being taken in by Diana. With Florence, Nan struggles to find her true self, to establish some semblance of a normal life, and to put her past behind her.
Unexpectedly, it is with the plain-faced, hard-working Florence that Nan has the chance to find real love, but her feelings and commitment will be sorely tested by the sudden reappearance of several faces from her own past and a lingering ghost from Florence's past that threatens to keep them apart.
Waters depicts her characters and settings with colorful flair and vivid imagery. From the simple, hardworking values of an English fishing village to the bawdy, flamboyant lifestyles of the performers in London's theaters, Tipping the Velvet paints a sensuously lavish picture of the smells, sights, denizens, and desires of late Victorian England and its growing lesbian culture.
-- Beth Amos
The New York Times Book Review