Introducing Letters Between Gentlemen

When I first saw Professor Elemental in a youtube video, I thought what a wonderful person he would be to work with. It was just a pipe dream, back then. And yet, a series of opportunities came my way, and here we are, here he is, and the book we wrote together is now available.

although that’s not quite how I tend to pronounce my name, but just as I don’t call him Professor when we’re not in a performance context, he tends not to call me Nimue. It’s actually my middle name, and not always the name I use at home, but when in use, I prefer the three syllabled Nim-oo-aye, to rhyme with ‘hay’.

Letters between Gentlemen involves a lot of messing about with history, for purposes of giggles and subversion. I have read a lot of published letters and journals from the Victorian era, a time when the letters of important men were frequently published. Of course many of our characters are women. There’s quite a lot of playing with gender – at least six cases of mistaken gender identity across the whole thing, in fact. I hadn’t stopped to count before, that’s actually rather a lot…

There are some esoteric bits – what is faux Victoriana without some dabbling occultists? In this case, it’s all about the Hermitic and Scientific gentlemen’s club. Or was that the London club of scientific, hermetic gentlemen? There are splitters, it makes it tricky to keep track. Watch out for John the Retriever, the floating mystic of Covent Garden as well. The Professor himself walks a fine line between magic and science, in that what he does claims to be scientific but frankly can only be explained by magic.