Browse reviews

Brighton Fringe 2013

Betsy: Wisdom of a Brighton Whore

Something Underground

Genre: Drama

Venue: The Old Police Cells,  Brighton Town Hall

Festival:


Low Down

I didn’t want to give this show five stars. The story is a bit thin, and there are inconsistencies in the plotting. Plus, the lighting is rather rudimentary, and the play took place in the Old Police Cells under Brighton Town Hall, which was very difficult to find, without enough signage, and when we finally got there the walls had damp patches and the seats were hard.

I really didn’t want to – but finally I couldn’t help myself…

Review

"I couldn’t help myself…". I imagine that’s what a lot of Betsy’s customers told themselves after they had experienced a bout of passion with her. For Betsy is a whore – a Brighton whore from the nineteenth century. She’s sexy, and rude, and outspoken, and brave… and this was her story.

Right from the start she blew us away. Rachel Guershon is quite tall, with shoulder length dark hair and wonderfully arched black eyebrows, and she played Betsy in a loose white blouse and a corset, above a red dress that (some of the time) covered her petticoat and her calf-length white knickers. The Old Police Cells is a pretty small venue, and none of the audience was more than ten feet from the actress – we could see her close up, and she was able to eyeball us one by one, and she did.

She’s a working girl, of course, and she spoke, not exactly Cockney, but certainly with an EastEnd accent – presumably migrated down from London to service the nobs (pun intended). She put her hands on her hips and leaned slightly forward towards the audience as she accused us all of hypocrisy – "I know what you’re thinking – I can see it on your face". Then – "Don’t judge me. You think it’s easy, do you, to live the way I live? You ever been in a workhouse? Well I ‘ave – born in a workhouse, lived in it, grew up in it, seen my friends die in it. Not a life."

Grinding poverty driving women into prostitution; not much has changed in a hundred and fifty years. The moral climate hasn’t changed much, either – "You want me to stay cooped up then. Keeping me off the streets so you don’t have think about me. Course you bloody do." Then Betsy stared very hard at us – "Your men, when they pay me, they might – prefer me – to you. They can’t get enough of what I’m willing to do for ’em." She finished this line with a swing of the hips and a contemptuous toss of her head. Bold as brass.

Bold. I suspect that Rachel might have done stand-up as well as conventional theatre, able to ad-lib and deal with hecklers. She spotted me taking notes and she was onto me like a flash – "You still think you’re better than me, with your pen and your little pad? That what you’ve got in that little pad is better than me? That what I’ve got between my legs is nastier than the thoughts you’ve got between your ears, or down your little pants?"  Blimey! – I bet you all thought that theatre reviewing was a safe occupation.

Rachel Guershon had given us a vividly drawn portrait of a prostitute, but thus far it was still essentially stand-up. After Betsy got pregnant by one of the town worthies, the corrupt Bintshaft (what a wonderfully evocative name to roll around the tongue…), she gave birth in the sea on the Brighton shingle. Now the performance became physical theatre, as Rachel squatted, groaned and strained through the agony of the birth-pangs, with a Scotswoman acting as midwife urging her to – "Push, Push." Rachel did the woman’s Scots accent along with Betsy’s, and it was hard to remember that we weren’t actually watching two people on the small stage.

This theme was carried further, as Rachel gave us a series of women, each recounting her squalid birth – in a textile mill, on the beach, or – "on the floor of the poorhouse, by the loom itself." Different women, with accents from all over the country, but with a common experience of poverty and degradation. Rachel did them standing, squatting and lying on their backs, and each one seemed to appear like a ghost out of the shadows, giving testimony before fading back into the darkness. At least half the women just gave us the bare story, but towards the end they gave us their mothers’ names, too. "Her name was Anne" "Her name was Lizzie" "Her name was Daisy". The sequence lasted less than three or four minutes, but I know it will haunt me for years.

The underlying story of ‘Betsy’ is a Victorian melodrama, with the corrupt Bintshaft and his evil henchman doing dirty deeds. It’s also the prequel to ‘The Well’, and gives the history of some of the characters in that piece. At one point Betsy is saved from an assault and taken to her rescuer’s room to recover. This was a truly astonishing piece of physical theatre, Rachel lying in a chair, panting with fear and the after-effects of strangulation, and at the same time giving us the gruff voice and comforting gestures of her saviour. Once again, it was very difficult to keep in mind that we were watching a single performer.

So – we got melodrama, we were made to confront our own moral positions, we heard a lot of very funny lines (the script is by Jonathan Brown, who also directed this production) and saw an awesome piece of physical theatre in an intimate space that put us really close to the performer. Rachel Guershon is truly a woman to watch. Try to catch her if you can.

 

Published