“To be honest, it was the worst thing and the best thing,” says Keeley Hawes, with a nervous laugh. The sultry 26-year-old plays Kitty Butler, a magnetic and talented male impersonator who captures the heart of young Nan Astley (played by beautiful Rachael Stirling, who happens to be Dame Diana Rigg’s daughter) in the film adaptation of Tipping the Velvet created for BBC television and shown in the United States over three nights on BBC America May 23-25.

She’s not talking about the film’s steamy sex scenes.

Instead, she’s admitting she was nervous about the portions of the film in which she had to sing and dance. “It’s a nice feeling to have done it now, but I did find it terrifying at first,” she says. “I studied singing and dancing at stage school but I spent a lot of time sitting underneath the table, having a fag [cigarette], so I missed out on most of it!”

She must have made up for lost time in rehearsals, because she managed to hoof it just fine in the finished version of the film.

Tipping the Velvet is the story of Nancy Astley, a sweet young girl who lives with her family in the seaside town of Whitstable, Kent, in southern England. Set in the 1890s, the film is a lush adaptation of the Sarah Waters novel by the same name. (Look for Waters in a cameo shot as a Victorian-era audience member.)

When we first meet our heroine, Nan is caught up in the mundanity and routine of a life spent working at her family’s oyster parlor. In her leisure time, she strolls and occasionally “spoons” with her suitor, a local boy who’s a nice enough fellow. But late one night, Nan finally confesses to her sister that she doesn’t feel much for him. Her passions are awakened soon after by handsome Kitty Butler, a male impersonator performing on the local stage.

When Kitty invites her along to be her dresser in the big city of London, Nan jumps at the chance, even though it means leaving her beloved family behind. Adventures ensue, and the story follows Nan as she finds, then loses, and then once again finds fame, fortune and love. From cross-dressing and prostitution to sadomasochism and Sapphic love, the show bares it all in a three-night broadcast guaranteed to keep lesbian and straight viewers alike glued to the set.

When it first aired on BBC in Great Britain, the show attracted nearly 5 million viewers, more than twice the number of people who usually watch on a Wednesday night. Screenwriter Andrew Davies had promised his adaptation would be “absolutely filthy,” a promise meant to tantalize audiences. The tactic ultimately backfired when viewers complained afterward to the BBC Web site that the show wasn’t raunchy enough.

Still, it is risqué by American standards, with lots of sexy love scenes and bawdy humor. The film also stars Jodhi May as the good-hearted Florence Banner and Anna Chancellor (who also starred in Four Weddings and a Funeral) as the evil mistress Diana Lethaby. Even before its North American broadcast May 23–25, the show was delighting lesbian audiences at film festivals from Seattle to Miami.

Fully embracing the melodramatic elements of the show, some theatergoers even booed, hissed and cheered — just as audiences would have in the theater of the Victorian era.

Because camp and drag go hand in hand, the show employs a fair number of campy devices to punctuate its story line. In one heartsick fantasy of a deceiving lover and her new groom, flames of perdition lick the edges of the frame.

In another scene, the camera shows us Nan’s point of view when, dressed as a boy to earn a living by turning tricks, she peers through the folds of a man’s trousers as if she were opening the curtains of a tiny stage.

And later still, an unhappy Nan gazes at a tiny mechanical bird as it sings shrilly in its cage.

Stirling, herself a fan of the Waters novel, says that books like Tipping the Velvet “capture a little part of you and you’ll remember them forever.”

“I first read the book last year and I felt passionately about it,” she adds. To research her role, Stirling studied paintings of the Victorian period and male impersonators of the era. She cites in particular Vesta Tilley, the music-hall star born in 1864 who took London by storm through the 1880s and beyond by titillating both male and female audience members with her masculine attire and double-entendre banter.

“Kitty’s the first one Nan’s seen, but it was a pretty common act,” says Stirling of male impersonators of the Victorian era. Tilley, who eventually married her manager (though she kept her own name), had begun to take on male roles even as a child performer because, as Tilley herself said in a 1933 newspaper interview, she had “in song, run through the whole gamut of female characters.”

Readers of the novel may find the butch characters in the Tipping the Velvet film adaptation somewhat disappointing. Actresses as pretty as Rachael Stirling and Keeley Hawes can’t really be expected to pass as men, especially when the make-up department keeps retouching their lipstick between takes.

But the chemistry and acting sizzle, especially between lovers Astley and Butler.

In an interview during the Seattle leg of her Fingersmith book tour, even Waters seemed to quibble for a moment with the choice of aesthetic. “It’s mainstream TV,” she points out.

“The main thing for me is that the woman who plays Nancy, Rachael Stirling — well, she’s great — but she never looks very boyish. She’s too gorgeous; she’s too girlish. She never looks like she could genuinely pass as a boy on the street.”

Still, Waters acknowledged in another recent interview that she is satisfied overall with the film: “The whole thing has a sort of theatricality to it, in other ways, that I really like.” n

The Players
The decadence! The longing! Who will our lovely heroine Nan finally fall for? (Those of you who have read the book, shush!)

• The Naïve Chambermaid: She’s been wronged by her mistress, which entices Nan to befriend her in the most intimate of ways.



• The Cross-Dressing Songstress: She offers Nan a single, long-stemmed red rose, but can she ever really give away her heart?



• The Cruel Sadist: She saves Nan from the mean streets — and introduces her to some delightful forms of depravity between the sheets.



• The Good-Hearted Socialist: If she’s so devoted to the cause, can there possibly be room in her heart for Nan’s little lost soul?

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