BETSY: THE WISDOM OF A BRIGHTON WHORE
Phoenix Arts Club
★★★
“Strachan manages to evoke a cast of characters and a milieu of menace with an exceptional level of craft and dexterity”
We’re in a world of cads in carriages and saucepots in corsets as Betsy, an observer and grim recipient of human weakness, tells a tale of life on the edge.
Brighton, 1820s, and the sounds of breaking waves fill the air with thoughts of cheeky postcards and dirty weekends.
And this is how it begins in a monologue written and directed by Jonathan Brown and performed with captivating gusto by Imogen Strachan, alone on the stage for 90 minutes.
Betsy is lowly, yes, but she knows you. She sees you.
“Don’t judge me,” she yells petulantly at the outset. She is society’s ugly necessity, a riposte to complacent wives and an outlet for pompous men (“reverend this, reverend that”) who wear and jettison their piety like a cloak.
“I’ll lift my skirts and show you what I’ve been hiding for thousands of years,” she declares.
In a setting more used to cabaret, the atmosphere is that of music hall, with a gaudy wench performing raucous turns and double entendres for penny-a-pop revellers.
Having departed impenitent from the St Mary’s Home for Penitent Women, Betsy finds herself wined, dined and skewered by the knobs of the town, one of whom lingers longer in her memory than the other flies-by-night.
Brooding George Bintshaft, Guardian of the Town and Chair of the Committee for the Provision of the Poor, will be her undoing and the bringer of darkness into a life that was previously dismal but chipper.
Now with a child, Strachan’s Betsy becomes a more urgent and tragic figure, stripped of power and agency. Her frivolous games and waspish provocations are undone by the sight of a toddler who needs feeding.
The boy Jack is beginning to ask questions and she wears “more bruises than I can cover in stories and paint”.
Writer Brown and performer Strachan strip away the catty façade that sustains Betsy to reveal a woman – and a society – that is built atop a tip of discards. The music hall perkiness gives way to a penny dreadful melodrama as the whore is used and abused by those who can act without consequence because she amounts to nothing.
Intruding cameos tell the stories of other Brighton women about to give birth, a place which is so precariously poised between life and death. Suddenly Betsy is not a singular woman but part of an historic lineage of the forgotten.
The marathon journey from shabby chic to miserly degradation is too long and sometimes cliched, but Strachan manages to evoke a cast of characters and a milieu of menace with an exceptional level of craft and dexterity.
She shows, through dissolving layers of resolve, that pluck isn’t sufficient currency when society is stacked against you.
This is an unsettling and swirling vignette, with greater depth and moment than its bawdy trappings might suggest.
BETSY: THE WISDOM OF A BRIGHTON WHORE
Phoenix Arts Club
Reviewed on 4th April 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Christina Vale
Previously reviewed at this venue:
EDGES | ★★★★ | January 2024
