Brett Goldstein

Brett Goldstein Grew Up In A Strip Club

Brett Goldstein has such a great story to tell, it almost seems like cheating. The title’s a little misleading, but at the age of 21, his fresh-faced innocence was shattered when he accidentally found himself spending 12 months running a strip club in Marbella. As you might expect, it hardly attracted the most salubrious of clientele – Armenian hitmen, the Irish mafia – while the boss was psychotic and the staff characterful, to say the least.

Goldstein has filtered the funniest moments of that formative experience into an expertly told hour-long story, bringing out the mordant wit of what must have been a tough time. The brief list of incidents he mentions in passing that were too strong to fit into a stand-up show only reinforces the idea that this was a terrifying place for a kid just out of university – where, honestly, he studied film and feminism – to find himself. Like many details here, his degree seems so unlikely that it just has to be true, as a dramatist would probably step back and say ‘no, no, that’s too much’…

Even with Goldstein’s charisma and skill, this isn’t a laugh-out-loud romp, and struggles to fit its ‘comedy’ billing. But it is a tale as vicariously gripping as any gangster movie, full of drugs, power trips and larger-than-life personalities. This is not about the seedy sexual side of the business; even as a hormonal youth, Goldstein had bigger problems on his mind, and the girls barely get a look-in in his tale.

read more of this review …

Older Comments