There is a carnival of talent in Tipping the Velvet. Sarah Waters’s absorbing novel follows Nan, an oyster girl, as she falls for a male impersonator at the music hall, takes to the boards as a swell, wakes to homosexual love, has an erotic escapade involving a giant dildo, poses as a rent boy, and finds happiness fighting for socialism and women’s rights. It is a fiction about making yourself up. Laura Wade – now most famous for her Bullingdon-basher Posh – brings political edge as well as stage-tested flourish to the task of adaptation. Lyndsey Turner is – as Posh, Chimerica and her Cumberbatch Hamlet proved – a director of whirling effects.
The fundamental decision is to stage the play as music hall, nodding to the Lyric’s early-20th-century past. Sex with a dominatrix becomes a spin on a trapeze for two entwined women. An episode pleasuring a crowd of gents and chancers turns into a series of parps, honks and whistles as our heroine, jaunty in her guard’s uniform, visits her clients lined up as carnival cutouts, tweaking and tugging at their privates. When hard up and discarded, she sings mournfully while dangling from a butcher’s hook alongside the carcasses of pigs. David Cardy comes on as an MC, caustic and jaunty with top hat and gavel. You can’t, of course, have a story of female empowerment topped and tailed by a fellow. In a lovely touch at the end, he hands his gavel over to our heroine, watching his power wane like a downmarket Prospero.
Sally Messham makes a glowing debut as Nan. There is a very good riff on Nancy Sinatra’s boots (the songs draw on latter-day pop throughout). Wade has done an incisive scalpel job, carving out, crystal-clear, the major calling-points on the heroine’s path towards socialism and sapphism. Yet it is hard not to compare this as an adaptation to Sally Cookson’s reimagining of Jane Eyre, now soaring at the National. For all the gaudy touches, this Tipping is not a really radical staging. The hullabaloo is on the outside. The love and the politics are insufficiently ardent. The sex is not raunchy enough. The act is pallid compared to the real music hall cavortings. Laura Rogers, as a musical artiste, has allure but too much politeness. When Marie Lloyd sang, she gurgled as if she were being goosed.
• At the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 24 October. Box office: 020-8741 6850.
