Tag Archives: The Phoenix Arts Club

BETSY: THE WISDOM OF A BRIGHTON WHORE

★★★

Phoenix Arts Club

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

 

 

BETSY

BETSY

BETSY

EDGES: A SONG CYCLE

★★★★

Phoenix Arts Club

EDGES: A SONG CYCLE at the Phoenix Arts Club

★★★★

“Each number is a standalone gem”

It is often the case that when artists achieve a degree of success, in whatever field they operate, their early back-catalogue is revisited. Oscar, Grammy, Tony and Olivier Award-winning songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are best known for their work on ‘La La Land’, ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘The Greatest Showman’. “Edges – A Song Cycle” was written when the pair started working together as freshmen at the University of Michigan in 2005. Having both been involved in the school’s musical theatre production, they were inspired to create their own a year before they graduated.

It shows its age in the pared back revival at the Phoenix Arts Club – and it also shows the author’s age at the time of writing. The lyrical content of the fourteen songs focuses on the trials and tribulations of moving into adulthood, with the inevitable and somewhat predictable moments of self-discovery. There is no narrative as such that links the musical numbers. Instead, each song is a tale in itself. A recital; rich in structure and harmony, and lyrically strong despite a few dips into the clichés of self-doubt. The opening song is the main culprit with its chorus of ‘I’m afraid to be who I am’ – but Pasek and Paul do redeem themselves when the cycle comes full circle, and the line is rephrased for a rousing finale.

Between the bookends, the fourteen songs are chapters in which the characters bear their souls, their dreams, their doubts and yearnings, anxieties, frustrations and loves lost and gained – from the various perspectives of friends, lovers, parents and siblings. The influences extend beyond musical theatre, with echoes of modern American songwriters appearing throughout. Billy Joel’s ‘Movin’ Out’ is strongly referenced in the second upbeat number (unfortunately no song list was available at the performance), while shades of Randy Newman, and even Carol King, permeate throughout the evening. Each number is a standalone gem, but when strung together over time they do lose a bit of their colour. Like a monochrome festoon, of fairly low wattage.

“The sole accompaniment is piano, but we can hear the potential of full arrangements in our heads thanks to musical director’s Ben Ward’s fluency and eclecticism”

But the performances light up the piece and bring it fully to life. The characters are named simply Man One, Woman One, Man Two and Woman Two; played respectively by Cameron Collins, Holly Adams, Gareth Evans and Maia Gough. Individually their voices are perfectly suited to the material and faultless in their delivery. Collectively, the close harmonies are simply a joy to the ear. Taylor Jay’s staging uses the basement club to great effect, allowing the singers to move between two stages within the space. End-on for the most part, the characters drift occasionally from the mainland to an island out in the auditorium, from which the more plaintive, solo numbers are delivered. The sense of isolation is heightened, particularly when reaching out to a counterpart on the main stage.

The sole accompaniment is piano, but we can hear the potential of full arrangements in our heads thanks to musical director’s Ben Ward’s fluency and eclecticism. Ward mixes virtuosity with sensitivity, following the moods of the lyrics with a conductor’s flair and judgement, seamlessly connecting the song vignettes with an invisible thread.

It is a thread that is only just held together, despite the fine performances and craftmanship of the compositions. There is an overriding question of where it is going, or what this is all for. The song cycle has the air of an early demo, found in the loft. Or a bonus-track CD. Whether it can straddle the crest of the wave its authors are riding is an unavoidable challenge. But for eighty minutes we can ignore the speculation and enjoy the retrospection instead; allowing ourselves to drift back in time to witness the gentle poignancy of a fledgling American song writing duo.


EDGES: A SONG CYCLE at the Phoenix Arts Club

Reviewed on 21st January 2024

by Jonathan Evans

 

 

More shows recently reviewed:

EXHIBITIONISTS | ★★ | King’s Head Theatre | January 2024
ALAN TURING – A MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY | ★★ | Riverside Studios | January 2024
2:22 A GHOST STORY | ★★★ | Royal & Derngate | January 2024
THE ENFIELD HAUNTING | ★½ | Ambassadors Theatre | January 2024
KIM’S CONVENIENCE | ★★★★ | Park Theatre | January 2024
REHAB THE MUSICAL | ★★★ | Neon 194 | January 2024
COWBOIS | ★★★★★ | Royal Court Theatre | January 2024

Edges

Edges

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