Tipping the Velvet: Sally Messham Interview
Sally Messham talks to The Skinny about professional debuts, learning circus skills, and bringing the highly celebrated novel Tipping the Velvet to life
Sarah Waters' debut novel Tipping the Velvet has been described as a 'saucy and sensuous historical romance' that grips readers with its shifting voice and its many different layers, all told through the eyes of its hero, Nancy Astley, or, depending on where in the story you meet her, Nan King.
It is a picaresque tale, following the adventures of a roguish hero who hails from the lower classes, but a rare picaresque tale in that it's told from a female perspective, and particularly a lesbian one.
The story starts with Nancy Astley in Whitstable, Kent. From the audience of a music hall she falls in love with Kitty Butler, a male impersonator, and soon follows her to London to begin her adventures. This is a typical and auspicious start to any coming-of-age tale, but it is what happens after, and the direction that Nancy takes, that really set the novel and its hero apart from any other.
Now Tipping the Velvet is coming to the stage. It moves to the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh after a run at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, where it was commissioned to be performed. The play is adapted by Laura Wade and directed by Lindsay Turner, the duo behind the highly successful Posh, and has been on the horizon for the past four years.
Helming the production as Nancy herself is Sally Messham, an actress making her professional stage debut. Messham took some time out of the busy preview period to call The Skinny and let us know what to expect from this theatrical adaption.
"It's not a conventional coming out story" – Sally Messham
“We’re still in previews at the moment so we’re working really long days, performing on the night and making cuts and changes,” she tells us. “It’s a much bigger show than anyone predicted it was going to be so we’re still trying to figure it out and measure audience reactions.
We’ve only had four weeks' rehearsal, but the show is very technical and we’ve had to tech it twice. We’re trying to make it function like a machine, but it’s getting there and last night it felt like it came together as the show that it’s going to be.”
The show that it’s going to be promises to be something on an incredibly grand scale, mixing all sorts of theatrical convention with the Victorian world, and with modern music too. For a novel that is so rooted in theatre itself, set in and out of music halls around London, it feels like an appropriate homage to the scale of Waters’ world. “It’s a really vibrant show,” Messham tells us. “It’s quite stimulating.”
Audience Reaction
She describes the audience reactions from previews this far as “really positive, with a really mixed crowd of people coming to watch it. We had a bunch of school kids in yesterday which was really interesting.”
It is certainly an interesting choice for school children when you look at the plentiful and detailed sex scenes of the novel, and although the play does not shy away from these, it does present them in a new light. “We’re doing circus,” says Messham. “The sex scenes are done through ariel scenes so it’s been amazing to learn those skills.”
As she talks about the process of making her professional debut, she describes it as being “chucked in at the deep end. I don’t think I’ll ever be as busy again. It’s just been brilliant to learn lots of different things – I play the ukulele in it.”
With all these layers, it’s a complex role to play. “It’s a really physically and mentally demanding role because she goes on such a journey; it’s like having three different plays in one. Whoever she encounters, it's like a completely different world, it’s like three worlds.”
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This journey and these different worlds are presented in Waters’ novel so clearly through Nancy’s eyes, so how is this worked into the play? “Essentially it plays with a lot of theatrical conventions. It kind of pushes the boundaries,” Messham tells us. “There’s a character who takes the form of an old music hall-style chairman. He narrates the whole show and you as an audience have to decide who he is, whether he is speaking Nancy’s thoughts or whether he’s an outside narrator.
"I don’t want to give too much away but there’s a very new form to this play, which is why it’s quite exciting because it breaks a lot of theatrical conventions in that way. He follows Nancy’s journey with her and interacts with the audience. You go on that journey with him and you see what kind of character he is as well.”
The play adds even more layers to Waters’ novel, but not in a way that detracts from the layered complexity of its hero. “I think the reason that I like it is that it’s not a conventional coming out story. [Nancy] is so comfortable with who she is,” says Messham. “It’s not like she’s trying to hide the fact she’s feeling all these feelings, it’s just what happens.”
A Coming-of-Age Story
The idea of a lesbian heroine who not only accepts herself, but does so without much questioning – and set in an era where being found out represented a very real danger – is incredibly refreshing and something to be celebrated. But it does not leave us with a brash character who is one-dimensional or defined only by her sexuality. She is still a young girl trying to find her place.
“She’s so vulnerable to the people around her and she’s torn,” explains Messham. “It’s such a brilliant coming-of-age story, she’s neither likeable or unlikeable. There's just so many different sides to her.”
It’s not just within the world of the play that women are at the forefront and celebrated either – it is vital to its making too, which becomes clear as Messham describes getting to work with Lindsay Turner, recently to be found directing Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet at the Barbican, and writer Laura Wade.
“It’s genius. She's an absolute genius,” she tells us of Turner. “She’s got so much wisdom and she’s so intuitive, she’s a real actress' director. She works so closely with Laura and they’ve both been really involved in developing the play together. It’s been in the running for quite a long time, for about five years I think. It’s a real collaboration between a lot of people and we’ve had a lot of input as well in workshopping it. I wasn’t in the original research and development crew but a few people in my cast were. It’s been very collaborative but also amazing to work with such a talented director. She’s brilliant.”
Messham’s excitement about the role and the play as a whole is clear in the way she talks about it, as are her feelings on getting to work with such fantastic collaborators. This play is sure to be mesmerising when it comes to the Lyceum at the end of the month. With such fantastic source material, how could it not be?
Tipping the Velvet at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, 28 Oct-14 Nov, 7:30pm (2pm), prices vary