Official: Sally Messham & Laura Rogers to Lead Stage Adaptation of TIPPING THE VELVET This Fall

Sally Messham and Laura Rogers, are to star as Nancy 'Nan' Astley and Kitty Butler in Laura Wade's electrifying new adaptation of Sarah Waters' bestselling novel, Tipping The Velvet, directed by Lyndsey Turner.

It's 1887 and Nancy Astley (Sally Messham) sits in the audience at her local music hall: she doesn't know it yet, but the next act on the bill will change her life. Tonight is the night she'll fall in love... with the thrill of the stage and with Kitty Butler (Laura Rogers), a girl who wears trousers. Giddy with desire and hungry for experience, Nancy follows Kitty to London where unimaginable adventures await.

Sally Messham plays Nancy 'Nan' Astley. Sally has recently graduated from RADA where she appeared in productions of The Sugar Wife, Women of Twilight, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Stasiland and After Mies Julie. Tipping the Velvet will be her first professional lead role on stage. She will also be appearing in the new ITV drama Midwinter of the Spirit alongside Anna Maxwell Martin.

Laura Rogers plays Kitty Butler. Laura's theatre credits including An Ideal Husband, Blue Remembered Hills, Hay Fever (Chichester Festival Theatre), Pressure (Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh), Masterpieces (Royal Court), Three Sisters (The Wapping Project), 55 Days (Hampstead), The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth, A New World, A Life of Thomas Paine, As You Like It (Shakespeare's Globe), 39 Steps (West End), The Dark Philosophers (National Theatre of Wales), and Gloucestershire (Arcola). On television she has appeared in New Tricks, Twelfth Night, Dr Who - Christmas Special, (BBC), The Smoke (Sky 1), Law and Order: UK, Midsomer Murders (ITV), Dates (Channel 4) and Dark Matters (Discovery Channel).

Sarah Waters has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998, Betty Trask Award); Affinity (1999, Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award); Fingersmith (2002, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger); The Night Watch (2006, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize); The Little Stranger (2009, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award) and The Paying Guests (2014, shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction).

She was included in Granta's prestigious list of 'Best of Young British Novelists 2003', and in the same year was voted Author of the Year at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference, and won the Waterstone's Author of the Year Award. TV and film adaptations include Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and The Night Watch for the BBC and Affinity for ITV. For the stage, Sarah co-wrote, with Christopher Green, The Frozen Scream which premiered in December 2014 at the Cardiff Millennium Centre and Birmingham Hippodrome.

Photo by Jay Brooks