Betty

Synopsis

This one-woman show tells the story of naive spinster Betty Buchanan whose eyes are opened when her washing machine spins out of control on her 49th birthday...Awakened to dizzying new heights of pleasure, the confused Betty sets off on a bizarre pilgrimage with hilarious and unexpected results in a desperate attempt to rid herself of her addiction to the spin cycle!

Our Review:

10 July 2002

Put the word "dark" or "black" in front of the word comedy and the resulting term very often seems little more than a euphemism for "crude and distinctly unfunny". I'm afraid this is the case with Karen McLachlan's pointlessly distasteful one-woman show Betty.

In it, Geraldine McNulty plays the eponymous and exceedingly thick heroine, a lonesome spinster who, on the morning of her 49th birthday, discovers the joys of the spin cycle in her kitchen. After confessing to her priest, she embarks on a bizarre weekend pilgrimage in an attempt to cure her addiction to "self-pleasuring".

While McNulty may be the only person on the stage, it's irresponsible to pin all the blame on her. True, her affected manner of speaking grates, but she does manage to convey a touching excitability in Betty while also differentiating the array of religious nutters, sexual perverts and pious hypocrites she encounters.

No, I blame the playwright. For, even as McNulty's effort...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 26 July 2002:

an Edinburgh fringe monologue stretched to breaking point and cruelly over exposed in the West End - surely a fool hardy risk to open such a show in the Summer when the West End is not exactly in a healthy state.... and Katharine Dore the Producer's name in letters as big as the star, writer and director on the marquee... a dangerous precedent ?...

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