That’s without even mentioning the mansplaining narrator …Ĭaitlin Benedict: Oh, that narrator. And when what we’re all being encouraged to laugh at is the idea of two women falling in love (or having sex in some weird metaphorical circus act), there’s a pretty massive problem here.

All this form knows how to do is make us laugh. The trouble is, though, that the broad comedy of the music hall turns out to be incompatible with Waters’ complex and nuanced depiction of queer women in the late nineteenth century. I can see why, as an idea, framing the narrative as a series of music hall acts could seem like an ingenious way of staging a novel of such epic scope. Moving it to the theatre, why wouldn’t you emphasise that?īut in Laura Wade and Lyndsey Turner’s adaptation, the music hall theme has been underlined at the expense of everything else. It’s about much more besides, but the intoxication of the stage is central to Sarah Waters’ novel – at least for the first half. And so it makes sense, in theory, to seize on the music hall element of Tipping the Velvet. The vocabulary of theatre is necessarily different to the language of a novel. Here, five Exeunt writers with fond memories of Sarah Waters’ 1998 novel react to the Lyric Hammersmith’s stage adaptation with a mix of bafflement, sympathy and hardened resignation.Ĭatherine Love: Adaptation is always an act of transformation, or perhaps translation: taking something from the language of one medium and rendering it in another. Tipping the Velvet was groundbreaking for bringing explicit depictions of lesbian love and sex to the bestseller tables of Waterstones and to family living rooms everywhere, thanks to a particularly saucy BBC adaptation. Credit: Johan Perssonĭevoted readers have a sense of ownership over any novel that’s adapted for stage, or film: just look at the enthusiastic frame-by-frame scrutiny of Potter fans, or the fury with which Janeites greeted the so-called “ pig version” of Pride & Prejudice (2005). Sally Messham and Laura Rogers in ‘Tipping the Velvet’ at Lyric Hammersmith.

Tipping the velvet