4

	Old Police Cells Museum (venue website) Theatre 9-10, 16-17, 23-24 May, 6:30pm-7:30pm; 11, 18, 25 May, 4:00pm-5:00pm Reviewed by Darren Taffinder
Warning: Contains strong language.  World Premiere.  Suitable for age 16+ only.

Take it from me: when watching a show about an 18th-century prostitute, it’s best not to sit in the front row. Especially if you’re a man on his own. There were moments when I didn’t quite know where to look. This is a fun, and at times crude, look at Victorian Brighton, but I do have one big misgiving – the way it ends.

When we first meet her, Betsy has just left St Mary’s Home for Penitent Women for not being penitent enough. She quickly moves into the basement of Thomas Kemp’s abandoned house (the founder of Kemp Town having skipped across the Channel to avoid his creditors), and while there she is visited by the great and good of Brighton, who are not as great or as good as they’d like to think. She quickly catches the eye of the guardian of the town and chair of the committee for the provision of the poor, George Bintshaft, and it’s not long before she begins regularly visiting his mansion on Brunswick Square.

Rachel Guershon is great as Betsy, a spectacularly foul-mouthed but deeply flawed woman. She is someone you can’t help rooting for. You want her to succeed, but you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of her tongue-lashings. Guershon is a wonderfully physical actor, and one of the highlights comes early in the play when she is giving birth to her son. You can really feel the pain and fear in her performance.

The play takes place in the Old Police Cells Museum, giving it a wonderfully gothic atmosphere. You also get a sense of why prostitution would be preferable than going into the work-house. I loved the nice historical touches; as a student I used to drink in the Quadrant, her pub of choice, all the time, and I’ll never look at the clock tower the same way again.

At times, I did find Guershon’s performance a little too rigid. I sometimes felt she needed to loosen up a bit. However, my main problem is the end wasn’t satisfying. Betsy is billed as a prequel to another play, The Well, and is part of a trilogy on Brighton history (also including The Silent Stream, which focuses on the Prince Regent, George IV). The Well is about the digging of the Woodingdean Well, the deepest hand-dug well in the world – as deep as the Empire State building is high.  Its main character is Betsy’s son.

I’m not a big fan of prequels, and Betsy shares the same problem I find with many of them. I understand the ambition of building a rich, multi-part narrative, but each story needs to be able to stand alone; Betsy ended with a key character’s fate unresolved, and overall I felt I left with more questions than answers.  Some of the plot points seemed implausible too, perhaps through the need fit into an existing narrative.  It had the slight feel of a DVD extra, and at £10 a ticket it’s a rather expensive extra (though you can see all three for £20).

This was a shame, since the proceeding 55 minutes were truly gripping and enjoyable. A great show, and great performance, let down by a weak end.