my dad had a mid-life crisis and bought a strip club in Marbella

Festival veteran Brett Goldstein is back in Edinburgh to tell the general public all about his time running a strip club in Marbella. It all sounds pretty intriguing, so ThreeWeeks investigated. Well, asked a few questions, anyway.  

TW: Your show has a very interesting theme. Tell us more.
BG: The show is about the time when my dad had a mid-life crisis and bought a strip club in Marbella, instead of a new car, and how I ended up running it. It was a strange time, particularly as none of us had any experience of this sort of world before, and my dad had assumed that all businesses run the same. He had previously run bookshops and assumed it to be a similar practice…  Just instead of selling books, you’re selling dances….  The one thing he did not count on, was that when you open a strip club, no matter how clean you run it, it will attract the underworld. It will bring them right to your door whether you want it or not. The show is very much about this world, and about what happens when you live in this sort of environment for too long. But, you know, funny.

TW: It sounds like the experience you had might have been, well, traumatic, to an extent. Is this show cathartic for you? Where’s the humour?
BG: The experience had its fair share of trauma I suppose, but on the other hand, it was a hell of an adventure and I feel very grateful for having had it. I suppose there was some catharsis in the actual writing of the show; I have been mulling over this story for ten years, so to get it out feels good I think, but at the same time, it also makes me very anxious. There are things I talk about in the show, and people, that may not want to be talked about.  It is why I set up a very strict ‘circle of trust’ at the beginning of every show.  As for the funny, well, look, once you get past the darkness, with a little perspective the whole thing is utterly ridiculous. It’s like a farce. It’s about a series of stupid men who wandered blindly into a fantasy world they had literally no idea about and how they stumbled about causing trouble and destruction and trying not to get killed.  Its like ‘Fawlty Towers’ with tits.

TW: Do you make any general moral judgement about strip clubs, or do you only approach it in the context of its effect on you?
BG: I can only talk about it in relation to my experience. Strip clubs are individual. Some have nicer atmospheres and environments, and some are fucking dark hell holes. I have no moral objection to strip clubs, I completely understand why they exist and what purpose they purport to serve. I did however, find, in my experience, that strip clubs don’t bring a lot of happiness to anybody. They are weirdly conservative places that pretend to be transgressive. In a normal club you can kiss a girl and connect and fall in love (go to Espionage any night of the week) but in a strip club all you can do is watch a made up version of that life. I think it becomes damaging to the psyche after a while. If all you are doing is playing a game, then when is it ever real? I saw too many women corrupted and saddened by the hollowness of it, and too many men turned strange by it. But that was just what I observed…  I’m not the president.