Sarah Waters’ debut novel, exploring lesbian sexual awakening within the surroundings of the Victorian music hall, is to be adapted for the stage as part of the Lyric Hammersmith’s new season.
Tipping the Velvet, which tells the story of the passionate affair between Nancy Astley and Kitty Butler in Victorian London, will be adapted by playwright Laura Wade, who won praise for her play Posh which was recently made into a film. Lydnsey Turner, who worked with Wade on Posh, will direct.
This new adaptation of Waters’ 1998 novel has been in the works for four years, having been put on hold while the Lyric in west London underwent major refurbishment over the past two years.
The theatre’s artistic director, Sean Holmes, said the prize-winning author had been completely on board with the project. Wade worked closely with Waters on developing the script.
Speaking about the commission, Holmes said it was both the vividness of the world created by Waters in her novel and the themes it explores that had attracted him to the idea of transferring it to the stage.
“I knew Waters’ novels, loved her writing and I just thought that the subject and the aesthetic of Tipping the Velvet felt absolutely right for the Lyric,” he said. “What’s so brilliant about the novel is it is such an upfront, unapologetic celebration of sexuality that just happens to be between two women.
“Obviously it’s set at a time when that’s frowned upon but it’s also just really about the journey to love and sexual discovery and the massive, formative journey that applies to everyone, whatever your sexuality is, and yet you never see portrayed between gay women.”
While the novel was first adapted for television by the BBC in 2002 in a series starring Keeley Hawes and Anna Chancellor, Holmes said the work “somehow feels more surprising and more radical within the confines of theatre.
“It was actually only after I commissioned it that I suddenly realised how rare it is to stage such a story, particularly in a 556-seat populist theatre. People talk about Tipping the Velvet as a sexually explicit work, but is that only because it is a relationship between two women I wonder?”
Holmes described how Wade had taken advantage of the novel’s music hall backdrop in her adaptation, moving from “absolute fidelity” in her first draft to framing the whole piece “within the language of the music hall and performance”.
Expanding on this, he said: “It won’t be a musical, but because it is framed within the music hall language I think there will be song and performative numbers as part of the way of telling this story. Yes, it’s a challenge to take on, but a challenge in the right way, I think. It’s a really, big theatrical, populist but surprising show, and something that is very Lyric in its flavour.”
The commission comes as Waters’ sixth book, The Paying Guests, was shortlisted for the Bailey’s women’s prize for fiction.
Tipping the Velvet is part of the Lyric’s first season following a multimillion-pound capital development and the building of a new wing, which officially opens at the end of April. The first production to be staged at the renovated theatre will be a musical production of Bugsy Malone, which will run until August. Tipping the Velvet will open on 18 September.
