Posted by Bonnie on 25 October 2002 at
12:00
What next for Diana Rigg's gorgeous actress daughter Rachael Stirling? This week she was cuddling her boyfriend, John Lycett-Green, at a theatre party, just as the final part of her controversial lesbian drama, Tipping the Velvet, was being shown on TV.
But she tells me: "All I've been offered so far are slasher movies or porn, so I'm not rushing into anything. I'll probably do more theatre."
Rachael was helping John, grandson of the late Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, as he worked as the DJ at the aftershow bash for Michael White's brilliant new musical Contact at the West End's Queen's Theatre.
John, who runs a company called Digitall, is a regular DJ at Mayfair's Buddah Bar, and a nightclub in Bristol. "He's a fantastic DJ. I am just his deck dolly," says Rachael, who was accompanied to the show by John's mother, Candida, a close friend of the Prince of Wales.
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Posted by Bonnie on 22 October 2002 at
12:00
Now then, it's not often that a well-made period drama series gets extensive coverage, but Tipping The Velvet is a bit different.
[A clip of Tipping the Velvet plays, in which Nan, covered in gold paint and wearing a strap-on, is led into a room full of women.]
Ladies and gentlemen, Rachael Stirling!
[Rachael enters, wearing a red dress.] Why did you use that clip?!
Well, it seemed to me to be representative.
Did it?!
Is it true that you kept that golden dildo?
I have, yeah. Well, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and…
Well, you say!
I put it on my wall. It's the only thing to hold the weight of my Afghan coat!
I wondered what you were going to say then!
It's a coathanger. It's a coathanger, and boy does it hold a lot of coats!
I bet it does.
It's yay big [demonstrates size with hands] — it's enormous.
You know, when I watch that scene of you with the kind of ringmaster figure bringing you out, and the curtains open and there's all the leering audience and you standing there, it kind of reminded me of something.
What was that?
Well, I couldn't remember. It was nagging at me. I'd seen it somewhere, and then I remembered.
[A clip of The Avengers plays, showing Emma Peel in a similar scene.]
Very similar, you think?
[laughs] I'd never seen that clip before!
Yeah, but it is a very similar set-up.
God, it's strange, that!
In case you don't know, that was Rachael's mum. That's not a joke, it is Rachael's mum. So your mum is Diana Rigg?
Yeah, yeah.
Who was Mrs Peel. We've got a lovely picture of you two together.
[A photo of a young Rachael with Diana is shown. They are both wearing large white hats on their heads.]
Look at the…
Oh my god! That's a very long time ago.
What is the medal?
That must be when mum got her MBE, I think. And she obviously gave me that hat! Bitch!
I love to see a matching muff.
[Rachael laughs a lot]
You all right? Do you know you've been in the Daily Star on a regular basis? Tipping the Velvet week, this is the first one. You're actually on Page 3 of the Star, look!
[Page 3 of the Daily Star is shown, which features a photo from Tipping the Velvet. Rachael laughs more]
And every day they had girls in what they called 'Victorian underwear'!
Why is my tit hanging out? It looks like it's flopping about all over the place. I'm leaking!
When the football was on they printed a timetable.
I saw that!
So you could watch the England vs. Macedonia game, but still turn over for the dirty bits in Tipping the Velvet.
They did: 9.17pm, bottom; 9.13pm, flash of left breast. It was minute-to-minute. Did you follow that guide?
No, I watched the match!
So did I! Why would anyone else watch it if I was watching the match?
Does it put you off that it's mainly publicised for its titillation?
No, I think that's kind of funny, but I do also think that anybody that turns it on thinking "Oh, I might wank one off to this" will actually find it's good piece of drama, which it is!
They must be devastated! Chat-up lines have changed since the 19th century.
Go on, gimmie one.
Well, that one in it where a bloke said, "Have a heart. I'm as hard as a broom handle and aching to spend!" and it worked!
Well, you kind of get the point! Well, if somebody was to say that, what they're really saying is "Please god, do me a favour", rather than saying, you know, "The stars have fallen from the sky into your eyes" or some other cheesy line. Just say "I'm hard man! Bring it on!" You might get more luck.
If someone said that to you, you wouldn't.
I'd think about it for a second.
Fair enough! There's another one. Even in one of the more romantic scenes, someone says to you "Oh, you smell like a mermaid!" Now that's a double-edged sword!
Well, if you got the back story of it, she works in a fish shop. I work in a fish restaurant. She peels my glove off my hand and says "Oh, you smell…" and I realise she's smelling my hand and say "… like a herring!", and she says "No, like a mermaid", so it's romantic!
It's not a line I'd like to try. Well, let's have a look at another clip. This is you as Tommy Atkins. You spend quite a lot of time dressed as a bloke!
Yeah, she becomes a prostitute. I become a male prostitute. Nobody busts me for being a girl 'cause I shove a hanky down my trousers and I flatten my chest, and so she becomes a male prostitute. It's a sov for a dubbing, two for a suck, but I won't be buggered!
What a great catchphrase! So lets see Rachael as Tommy Akins.
[A clip of Nan at Diana's house plays. It is the scene in which Diana tugs the handkerchief out of Nan's trousers and sniffs it.]
Well, I heard you had a bit of a problem in that scene.
We did. Well, I was kind of keen to do everything, so I did my own props. And we were doing an over-Anna's-shoulder shot to my face, and she pulled the handkerchief out from the fly hole in my trousers. Only I'd completely forgotten to set the handkerchief in my fly hole of my trousers, so the director had the camera aimed close up on my face. And I was doing the scene, and Anna kind of rubs down my front and puts her fingers into the fly hole of my trousers and starts tugging, and whatever it is won't come loose. Meanwhile my eyes were watering like [does an impression of a wide-eyed face and squeaks a bit], and the director's going, "What the hell's she doing? Bloody hell, cut!" and he says, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" and I say "My pubes! She's been pulling my pubes!" I'd forgotten to put the handkerchief in there, and I couldn't wear any knickers 'cause I had to take my trousers off in a minute, and she'd been tugging really hard and I was too embarrassed to say anything. Silly girl!
Well, that serves you right for not setting your props! Have you had feedback from, shall we call them, the lesbian community? As if they all live together in a small village, sitting in pubs with tweed suits on, smoking pipes. Put Tipping the Velvet on will ya? Oh I'm as hard as a broom handle!"
I haven't had feedback off them yet.
Really?!
We're supposed to be going off and doing that gay festival in Seattle, but I don't know… I've got a double theory about it. I think some will love it and some of them will think this is chocolate-box-sized what was a really important book for a lot of people, and it's sort of dramatised in a BBC sort of fashion what was quite gritty and dirty in the book sometimes. So you can't win, because the men will say there's not enough sex, and some people who are passionate about the book say its not as lesbian-orientated and it's geared to a male audience, so you can't really win.
Before you go… for all the people that are watching, who don't know what Tipping the Velvet means, can you give us a brief meaning to the word?
The phrase is, when you watch Ali G, pretty much "munching the carpet", are ya wit me?
So it's the tip of the tongue?
Yeah. It's the most beautiful analogy. There are all these filthy analogies, and there is tipping the velvet. Mmmmm!
It's the velvet thing I can't understand.
Maybe you haven't been tipping the right kind of velvet!
Well, maybe you're right. Nothing like velvet. I've never seen one like velvet! It collects the bits like velvet!
[Picks up a cushion to throw at Frank]
I think we'll leave it there. It's been lovely talking to you, and all the best for the future! Rachael Stirling!
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Posted by Bonnie on 13 October 2002 at
12:00
In her voluptuous romp of a novel, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters took just over 100 pages to make the Sapphic graphic. Andrew Davies's adaptation achieved the same feat in under 45 minutes. But, then, his was a costume drama whose only purpose was to remove its costume.
At any rate, there was little attempt to get under the characters' skin before exposing it. The result was a lesbian love scene as perfunctory as any other television love scene. The same standardised choreography, the same carefully positioned bedsheets. The one novelty, and it was nothing to moan about, was that there were four breasts on show instead of the usual two.
Rachael Stirling, as a fish monger, emoted a paralysed longing, and Keeley Hawes, a music-hall male impersonator, was a crisp beauty. Yet the couple never remotely looked as if they wanted to get into bed together. Nor, come to that, did they look like a fishmonger or a music-hall male impersonator. Her delicate sexiness and sardonic delivery give Hawes the appeal of a younger Kristin Scott Thomas, and Stirling looked a bit like her mother, Diana Rigg. Alas, she sounded a lot like Jean Marsh in Upstairs Downstairs. The accent alone was a carnal death knell.
But passion has no need to speak for itself when there is voiceover to spell it out. The viewer, not trusted to gather that Stirling's despairing expression meant she craved something more from her friend, heard her disembodied complaint: "I didn't want to be her sister — I wanted to be her sweetheart."
Adaptations of first-person novels inevitably face the problem of what to do about the narrator's internal monologue. Could Davies, who has adapted more books than most of us have read, not have found a better solution than a restatement of the visually obvious? Perhaps the workload is finally taking its toll. He's too talented to be a hack, but jobs like these must hack away at his talent.
In his defence, Davies cannot be blamed for the overall cursoriness of the production. The truncated music- hall scenes and cropped views of London that only a pigeon would recognise spoke of a directorial imagination as limited as the budget. There was plenty of colour but no texture. Late Victorian England was seen merely as a decorative backdrop where in the book it formed the fabric of the story. The polite circumlocutions of the prose were a tantalising contrast to the forbidden desires of the protagonists. Waters understood the erotic potential that lies between what is said and how it's said. In the first instalment of this three-parter, style and content enjoyed none of that tension. These women were constrained only by their corsets. And not for long.
It's an odious business comparing a screen adaptation with the original novel. They are different forms, but they are also related fictions whose shared aim is to reveal the same, or similar, truths. As the fishmonger said at the beginning of the film: "Open an oyster and it's a secret world in there." In a novel, the world is your oyster, even in a novel whose world is oysters. But in an adaptation, the oyster is your world. And it takes more than extracting it from its shell to unveil its secrets. Perhaps that's a thought to keep in mind when I tell you that next week's episode features a strap-on dildo.
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Posted by Bonnie on 11 October 2002 at
12:00
According to Rachael Stirling, there are certain books that, as a young woman, "capture a little part of you and you'll remember them forever". For Rachael, Sarah Waters's Tipping The Velvet falls squarely into that category. Fitting, then, that she should be starring as its heroine, Nan Astley, in Andrew Davies's daring adaptation for BBC Two.
Rachael, who went to Wycombe Abbey School, says: "I first read the book last year and I felt passionately about it." The young actor explains earnestly: "The one thing I minded more than anything was that the film should be funny to watch. I didn't want it to be a breast-beatingly serious drama about lesbians, which it's not. It's a simple tale about this girl and the fixes she finds herself in. It has a vibrancy and an energy that just blow you away."
Set in the 1890s, Tipping The Velvet is a sensuous and entertaining love story, and Nan, the heroine, is at its heart, is a heroine as appealing and charismatic as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. As she grows into womanhood, Nan realises that she is attracted to women, not men, and the story follows her awakening, as she embarks upon a series of romantic adventures in the sexual underworld of Victorian London.
True to the original novel, Davies's scripts do not fight shy of portraying the whole of Nan's extraordinary story. And though Stirling knew the book "back to front" and has worked with Davies before. He penned ITV's modern reworking of Othello, in which she played the scandalous Lulu. When she received the scripts she admits that she was still taken aback at their candour.
"Andrew, naughty man, has got a lot to answer for!" she laughs. There are, she continues, "ways and ways of writing stage directions" even, she is convinced, when a dildo is involved.
Rachael turns serious for a moment. "But, listen, you don't see exactly what's written in the scripts. I'm not saying that you don't see anything you do and, needless to say, it's all justified and done very carefully but, as (director) Geoff Sax invariably said in every single scene, 'It's more the art of what isn't seen'. After all, you don't want to watch your leading girl through clasped fingers, embarrassed at what she's doing."
Resolutely determined not to trade on her starry family connections her mother is Dame Diana Rigg Stirling, 25, has spent the last four years carefully carving out a name for herself on her own merit.
Early on, she went "undercover" shunning interviews and concealing her background from agents and other actors to win a place at the National Youth Theatre and find an agent. By the time people realised who her mum was, Rachael was an established presence in her own right, with roles in popular films Still Crazy, Maybe Baby and Iain Banks's Complicity already under her belt.
"Looking back, I probably dealt with it in the wrong way," she says now. "I thought that admitting that she was my ma would somehow take away from my own achievement, which is dumb, and I now celebrate it and am hugely proud of it. She reads the odd script but she doesn't get involved with my work the joy is that we have that in common. She's my ma, not Diana Rigg."
Rachael, who has inherited her mother's striking dark looks, says that the experience of striding out on her own put her in a good position for tackling the role of Nan in Tipping The Velvet.
"I found it quite hard, during filming, to separate myself from Nan, simply because she's like most other young women who are trying to find their own identities," she says. "She's got a wonderful spirit of trial and error about her she tries anything and goes anywhere and meets anyone, just to try and discover who she is. She throws herself into things 400 per cent. She's strong, brave and funny, she's modest and charming. More than anything, she's determined to find someone to whom she belongs and somewhere to be at home, and the three episodes take viewers on a journey of her life."
And it is, Stirling agrees, quite a journey. "It's the 1890s and Nan doesn't feel she fits in particularly in Whitstable with her family. She doesn't belong in the oyster parlour, she's tempted by the theatre and finds herself drawn to Kitty. She goes from innocent girl to music hall star to rent boy to live-in lover with a manipulative, rich lesbian! Every single day of filming was a complete joy because I discovered something different about her."
As research, Rachael, who has a degree in art history from Edinburgh University, immersed herself in the period in which Tipping The Velvet is set.
"Through paintings, I'd gathered a certain amount of information about that period and I knew that the pornography that came out of Victorian England was shocking at that time. I also did a fair amount of research into male impersonators like Vesta Tilley; Kitty's the first one Nan's seen but it was a pretty common act."
Unlike her co-star, Keeley Hawes, Rachael couldn't wait to hit the stage for the drama's rollicking music hall scenes.
"I'd done a certain amount of singing and I knew I had a voice in me," she laughs, "and it turned out to be a belting voice rather than starling-like. But I loved the singing and it's not like becoming a great opera singer it's rather more nudge, nudge, wink, wink!
"Performing in front of the audience was great fun but there was something slightly different about when they were doing close-ups of us and there were only six people in the audience. You take a great big bow and there are six people going, 'Yeah, it was alright. Cut!'"
The actor says that she's thrilled to be part of a drama that was dubbed controversial months before the first scene was even filmed.
"Apart from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the odd snog on Brookside, there's very little else that's ever delved into lesbian relationships. Tipping The Velvet is about love, and it shouldn't matter whether it's two women or a man and a woman. Nan's so funny that you shouldn't mind whether she falls in love with a man or a woman, you want her to be happy at the end of it.
"If the lesbian theme makes people tune in, then all the better. I hope by the end of it, they're carried away by Nan and her story, so it overrides any titillation that they first expected. But there's definitely titillation there they won't be disappointed on that one!" she grins.
These days, Rachael "practically" lives with her boyfriend, John Lycett-Green, a DJ, in North London. The pair recently spent months apart while Rachael was filming The Triumph Of Love in which, incidentally, she plays "a cross-dressing comedy maid opposite Mira Sorvino" with director Clare Peploe and legendary film-maker Bernado Bertolucci in Tuscany. But now they're making up for lost time.
"On my down time I'm a DJ bitch," Rachael laughs. "I sit behind the decks and I thwhack any girl over the head who comes up slobbering over my boyfriend and anybody who comes up and asks for S Club 7!"
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Look forward to the US release of both films.
