The Scotsman
Abortion, suicide attempts and gender reassignment surgery – Bethany Black's debut Fringe show, Beth Becomes Her, rejects the comedy of shared experience and gratuitous "knob gags" for a detailed, funny and revealing hour about what happens when the penis itself is deemed surplus to requirements.
Undoubtedly the goth, lesbian, post-op transsexual comic to watch at this year's festival, the 29-year-old's life story will surely be one of Edinburgh's most talked-about.
Rather, it's a compelling account of a rare experience told with candour, balancing dark self-mockery with life-affirming moments. Never more so than Black's botched attempts to kill herself, which are both ineptly hilarious and genuinely pathetic.
Chatting in a café close to her girlfriend's Manchester flat, Black is droll, open and surprisingly well-adjusted for somebody with a history of depression. Naturally slender, she once acquired five and a half stone in six months through binge eating and drinking.
Today though, she's tall, pale, clad almost exclusively in black and more delicately featured than her self-assessment of "lesbian Hitler impersonator" implies. Born Ben Horsley in Preston, she came out as a transsexual to her parents ten years ago and has received more or less wholehearted support from her family ever since, adopting the surname Black at comedian Nick Doody's suggestion.
"My mum's never seen me perform, but I've bought two tickets for my parents to see me in the final week," she says. "It's going to be the scariest performance I've ever given, because I talk about her a lot in the show."
From forever changing clothes in the dark to entering the Miss Gay UK contest, Black still gets stage fright but feels increasingly confident in herself. At last year's Fringe she joined a host of comics and fellow exhibitionists to caper nude before an audience of 800 in the Pleasance Grand, as they reprised the finale of Phil Nichol's 2006 if.comedy-winning show The Naked Racist.
Beth Becomes Her was effectively conceived in Edinburgh. A comedy geek since childhood, Black only began performing when she realised that, at 17, the BBC New Comedy winner Josie Long was younger than her. Starting as a rock club compere at 25, Black drove up to the Fringe in 2006 with Australian comic Steve Hughes. Sleeping on friends' floors, she worked as Matt Kirshen's sound technician and Paul Sinha's flyerer, before encountering stand-up and film director Paul Provenza.
The American had started working on his next project, on comedy's role in promoting free speech.
"He asked if I'd be willing to talk on camera and so we ended up at the Spiegeltent, filming for two hours," Black recalls. "I talked about what I do on stage now, except that I hadn't done it at that point, I hadn't started dealing with my personal stuff. Then two nights later at (late-night ensemble gig] Spank, my last night at the festival, I thought, I don't know why I can't tell these stories on stage. So I did."
Even so, it was her friend Jason Cook's acclaimed show My Confessions at last year's Fringe that persuaded Black to drop a contrived set about Dan Brown-style biblical coincidences, Nearly Jesus, in favour of something more personal. Her director, Michael J Dolan, advised her, "the things that really touch people's souls are the things you would never normally tell anyone."
She initially tried to write like Peter Kay, but "I can't do observational. My life experiences aren't the same as most people's." Yet she's acquiring a following, one more diverse than the usual comedy club crowd – attracting "anyone who's ever been an outsider".
"When I grew up there was no-one like me on television," she says. "The closest I've had is the audience on Jerry Springer, Jeremy Kyle or Trisha and those aren't good role models by any stretch of the imagination. Some people ask, 'Why do you need to talk about this?' But if I don't, who will? My girlfriend and I have occasionally been abused in the street but I'm not going back in the closet, because the more people see this type of thing, the more used to it they become. Acceptance is what this show is about".
Fate certainly seems to endorse her – Black's girlfriend, Rosanne, introduced herself after seeing Beth Becomes Her's first performance."Those were odd initial dates, because I couldn't tell her anything she didn't already know. But I've never met anyone who so completely shares my outlook and now it really brings the show full circle."
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