Putting on the trousers allowed cross-dressing Victorian and Edwardian music hall stars such as Vesta Tilley to defy gender expectations. It also made the sparky Tilley, who took her name off a box of matches, one of the country’s top earners. At the height of her fame, she was commanding £1,000 a week.
But her appeal to both men and women meant her value to the British government during the first world war could be measured by the thousands of men, sometimes urged on by their sweethearts, who signed up to fight after watching Tilley on stage, dressed as an English Tommy, giving a call to arms through her songs.
JM Barrie’s Peter Pan may have unwittingly groomed a generation to think that “to die would be an awfully big adventure” but Tilley deliberately used her celebrity and performance skills to hurry young men to the front.
It’s a fascinating subject, but for all its simple pleasures, Joy Wilkinson’s play only scratches the surface of Tilley’s allure and war-time role. The fact that it’s intended for children over eight may explain the almost total failure to explore Tilley as a source of erotic fascination for both sexes, and for too much of its brief running time it focuses on biography. It feels like a sketch for something longer and deeper, considering guilt, responsibility and the theatre of war.
Nonetheless it’s very nicely put together by designer Hayley Grindle and director Lee Lyford, who together conjure all the allure of the music hall, particularly in the early and latter parts of the show, when it has an almost ghostly quality. The songs are terrific too, and there’s a great double act from Tom Espiner as Tilley’s dad, a man who instilled the idea that his daughter should always do her best and ignore death, and Emily Wachter, who is very striking indeed as the young Vesta.
• To March 15. Box office: 020-7645 0560. Venue Unicorn theatre.
