Isn’t it always the same? You get on to a good thing and someone has it away from under your nose. Remember at school when you’d be hard at it, answering a test paper and your class mate would be there copying your answers? So imagine how it was for poor Nelly Power, a Victorian music hall star who had her whole act, if not her whole life, stolen from her by a fifteen-year-old slip of a girl. This girl went by the name of Marie Lloyd, a much-celebrated star in her day (with buck teeth!), writes Lizzie Paul.
Nobody knows poor Nelly now so it’s great that Charlotte Walker has brought her to life again, with song, dance and comedy – and much gusto, glamour and humour. Walker is a one-woman powerhouse of a performer, clad in sparkling turquoise satin and feathers, who is onstage for seventy minutes with no mic, one pianist and no co-stars.
Both the girls’ acts relied on one song – The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery. It was originally penned for Nelly and, had she had the opportunity to tour the halls with it before Lloyd nabbed it, she would have shot to mega-stardom.
The play is set backstage with good-hearted Nelly giving all her trade secrets to a young wardrobe assistant (Lloyd), with whom she has a one-way conversation to great effect. We get to hear about Nelly’s life on and off the stage and we build a picture of this astounding woman. She gets married, he gets drunk, she buys herself lots of jewellery, he nicks it. He wallops her, she wallops him back. She meets a new, posh lover but he dumps her for a dull, posh girlfriend. One day by the sea she dives in to rescue a boy when all about her just stand and stare. She puts people in their place but you get the strong impression this is a woman with a big heart. She even has a brush with the Suffragettes! Sadly, Nelly was not in the best of health and died aged just 32, so even if she’d had her moment of fame it would have been short-lived.
All in all, Nelly Power comes across as a woman before her time but, of course, not all Victorian women were frail little things who reached for the smelling salts. In fact, many women could have identified with her!
The evening ended with Walker singing us some of Nelly’s songs and getting us all to join in. The man sitting to my left was particularly vocal, singing along to Lah-de-dah…