Betsy had a plan. Just one final trick and she would have saved enough money to take her son away from Brighton’s seedy underworld of the late 1880s. But it wasn’t meant to be for Betsy.
The play is deeply rooted in Brighton’s local history
Betsy's story begins at the St Mary’s Home for Penitent Women, where she wasn’t really penitent enough for a lifestyle of a nun. She was forced to move into a workhouse, but she rather chose to support herself by the oldest profession, prostitution. Betsy wasn’t looking for pity or sympathy. "Don't you judge me," she hissed ferally. "You think I don't see you selling your souls?"
The Brighton Fishing Museum loft, dedicated to Brighton's seaside history, gives an ideal setting for the play. It comes alive as we watch Betsy’s story unfold. For a while, she wasn’t doing too bad. She found ‘a rich nob’, George Bintshaft, to look after her, even if he never let her forget her place. Things got complicated when she gave birth to a son, Jacky, right there on the Brighton shoreline. Tender feelings of motherhood got inevitably on a crash course with the harsh reality on the streets. But Betsy was a tough cookie. She might have made it, if she had just kept her big mouth shut. Unfortunately, there was no happy ending for Betsy.
Betsy is a fictional character, but the play is deeply rooted in Brighton’s local history including prominent figures like the Prince Regent and Thomas Kemp. Also local landmarks like the arches, piers, the clocktower and the Quadrant pub play an essential part in the story. Writer Jonathan Brown does a great job in giving the award-winning Brighton-born actor Isabella McCarthy-Sommerville plenty of room to build a feisty yet adorable Betsy.
Isabella McCarthy-Sommerville delivers the one and a half an hour monologue with amazing passion and skill, every inch of her tiny frame becoming Betsy. Sometimes she was in your face – literally as the front row discovered – sometimes she drifted quietly away to her memories. She made us hang onto every whisper, every moan, every scream she made. As a gifted storyteller, Isabella not only delivered Betsy, but a long line of other characters in Betsy’s story. Especially the punters and other seedy male characters were pure brilliance.
What was missing then? As mesmerising and gripping as the story was, the final emotional trigger that would have had the Fishing Museum Loft weeping simultaneously with the waves was missing. There were elements in the story that could have been used to milk the tears, but perhaps the narrative just left too little room for deeper reflection. You cared for Betsy, you rooted for her and you desperately wanted her to make it.
As for the wisdom part, was there something that Betsy was trying to tell us? She refused to be a victim, but no matter how hard Betsy tried, she couldn’t cross the class barrier into becoming a respectable woman. Let the cobbler stick to his last, or the prostitute to her tricks. In a fairytale, Betsy would have escaped with her son to make a fresh start in life. But life wasn’t a fairytale then and it still isn’t today. There are plenty of Betsys out there.
