Whitstable, Variety, and ‘Tipping the Velvet’
A naked Italian opera singer, a ukulele orchestra, and a prawn tamer are three of the unusual acts that have taken to the stage at Whitstable’s End of the Pier show since December 2013. Organised by the Whitstable ANchorage Klub’s Sadie Hennessy, the popular show has attracted a large audience that attends in fancy-dress, and the ANchorage Klub was asked to take it to Canterbury’s Marlowe Theatre in June 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij8DqTtRhPM
Sadie herself describes the show as ‘traditional variety and modern variety’, and aims to fill each performance with a line-up of unique and innovative turns. Variety is also one of the key elements in Sarah Waters’ raunchy novel Tipping the Velvet, which also begins in Whitstable. In the novel, Waters takes us back to the Kent of Victorian times, and presents us with a music-hall known as the ‘Canterbury Palace of Varieties’, where the novel’s protagonist Nancy Astley falls in love with the star of the show.
Where Hennessy’s show exhibits Basil Thrush: a man dressed as a fox, Waters’ novel displays a ‘marvellous girl’ dressed as a boy, or a ‘masher’ as the slang of the period that Waters adopts terms her.
Although the variety production in Tipping the Velvet also includes an orchestra of ukuleles, along with an acrobatic troupe and a mentalist, it is Kitty the masher that steals the show, along with Nancy’s heart, and Nancy eventually becomes a masher herself, joining Kitty on stage in the West-End of London. On stage, Nancy finds a place for herself:
I had passed perhaps seven minutes before that gay and shouting crowd; but in those few minutes I had glimpsed a truth about myself, and it had left me awed and quite transformed
Like many performers, Nancy utilises the theatre as an outlet for expressing herself, but as a Victorian woman, the part she expresses on stage is the part she must repress off it. Although the stage provides Nancy with her sexual awakening, she uses performance throughout her glittering career to mask her own identity. Rejected by Kitty, Nancy journeys through an array of deviant and sensuous spaces, and eventually finds herself part of a socialist group where she falls for the women’s rights campaigner, Florence.
In inviting its readers to witness Nancy’s journey of self-discovery, Tipping the Velvet challenges conventional ideas about the lesbian in literary history, who has usually been deemed ‘apparitional’[1] or ‘Other’[2]:
Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this: was a girl
Like the socialists in the text, Waters gives a voice to those who have often been silenced. At the end of the novel, Nancy climbs the stage at the socialist rally and her performance no longer hides her identity, but becomes a call for change and equality, the exact call that Waters asks for with the book.
The novel ends with a ‘rising ripple of applause’ as Nancy’s days of acting come to a close and she becomes a fully-fleshed lesbian with an important place in society. Despite its unconventional content, the novel feels authentically Victorian, proving that variety, of both the theatrical and the sexual kind, did in fact have its place in Queen Victoria’s Whitstable as much as it does today.
