Tipping the Velvet

The 3-part BBC mini series ‘Tipping the Velvet’, from the acclaimed novel by Sarah Waters, faithfully adapted by Andrew Davies is a colorful, gutsy, passionate, erotic, gender-bending love story about Nan Astley, an oyster girl from Whitstaple. She falls for Kitty, a popular cross dressing music hall star, who takes her on a journey from the beaches of Southern England to the heart of London’s West End where she joins Kitty as a male impersonator on the vaudeville stage. Set in Victorian England in the 1890s, an era where love between women is clandestine, it is inevitable that difficult choices have to be made. Abandoned by Kitty, Nan takes a turn as a rent-boy, then ends up becoming a “kept woman” to high society vixen to find finally real and lasting love by Florence, a sympathetic socialist campaigning for rights for women and the working class. ‘Tipping the Velvet’ is a marvelously entertaining production, beautifully framed, filmed and lit, and full of visual and actorly invention. Geoff Sax provides his work an innovative flair to breath a new lease of life into costume dramas while the lead actress Racheal Stirling is magnificent, full of grace and sincerity in her transformation from frightened sparrow into audacious hawk.

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