Viva Lewes Issue #152 May 2019

ON THIS MONTH: THEATRE
Betsy
Wisdom of a Brighton Whore
Isabella McCarthy Sommerville remembers the
first time she read the part she’s about to take
on in this month’s Fringe: “It terrified me, and
not in a good way,” she remarks of the fictional
Brighton ‘whore’ at the centre of Jonathan
Brown’s play, Betsy. “I’d never done a one-woman
show before and I didn’t know if I could.” But
she felt differently when she re-read the script a
year later: “The fear had shifted into excitement.
It was a combination of things; partly having
played bigger roles but also just growing up. I
felt more capable than I had, more fearless.”
It’s a big role; Betsy is frank and sexy, but she’s
also vulnerable, a young woman living on
her wits. In an 1800s Brighton landscape that
contrasts grand Regency mansions with homes
for ‘penitent women’, she has been given an apparently
plum job keeping an eye on the house
of builder and developer Thomas Kemp. The
relocation introduces her to various upper-class
clients including a man by the (wonderfully
Dickensian) name of George Bintshaft, who
lands her in a situation that requires more than
street smarts to navigate.
The script goes from “visceral and bawdy to
shocking and dark,” says McCarthy Sommerville,
the third actor to play Betsy since Brown
premiered the play at the 2013 Brighton Fringe.
The part of Betsy leaves no room for coyness
and has been likened to stand-up comedy for the
way the actor must interact with the room. “In
the last show I did with Jonathan [The Good Jew]
there were a few moments when I had to make
direct eye contact with the audience. In this play
I do it a lot,” she says. The venue too puts the
audience right at the heart of things. Previous
productions took place in the claustrophobic
Old Police Cells in the basement of Brighton
Town Hall. This time the action moves to the
Cellar Suite beneath the historic Old Ship Hotel
– another intimate performance space. “The
capacity for each show is 25 people and they will
be spread around me so there’s nowhere to hide,
for me or the audience.”
But McCarthy Sommerville is prepared for the
challenge. “I spend a lot of time at the moment
dressed in Betsy’s big skirts and petticoats – even
if I’m just rehearsing my lines. They make me
move differently and feel more like her. I also
find that when I’m walking around town, in my
head I’m Betsy. I like to look at the landscape,
picturing what her life would have been like in
the same places I’m walking as a young woman
today. When I go past the big houses down on
Hove seafront that’s where I picture her.”
Nione Meakin
Betsy: Wisdom of a Brighton Whore, The Old
Ship Hotel, May 3, 4, 25, 31 & June 1.
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