When the comedian Brett Goldstein took his first one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe last summer, he knew he had a tale to tell. What was harder to figure out was how to tell it without everyone thinking he was a leering lad or a pornographer.
“I didn’t know how people would take it,” he says, “but I thought the one thing I had that other people didn’t have is this story. A lot of people can say, ‘Oh, aren’t trains annoying?’ but not a lot of people can say, ‘This is what it’s like to run a strip club. With your dad’.”
Brett Goldstein Grew Up in a Strip Club tells the true story of how the then 20-year-old Goldstein, fresh from his degree in film and feminism, joins his father in setting up a strip club in Marbella. The dream, unsurprisingly, soon turns sour.
Within days dad flies home to rescue his marriage to Brett’s mum. Which leaves the young Brett on his own to contend with a nightmare. There’s bullying, drugs, organised crime — and the daily challenges of wiping down stripper poles and being surrounded by naked women.
What is surprising is just how well Goldstein controls his material. Sure, crudity comes with the territory, but he’s never exploitative or crass. It’s not stand-up but a warm, wry and wise comic monologue. You can imagine it as a film: and, indeed, he got offers after the Fringe, but instead he wants to turn it into a television series.
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“I got about five years’ worth of material out of the one year I was there,” he says. “It would be a shame to blow it all on one film.”
So why did it take him ten years to bring it to the stage? “I was 20. I had to sit on it a while. Just in terms of it being real, and I’m scared of some of the people in the story too. The dark reality is that a lot of the bad people from the story are now dead or in prison.”
And this, as he suggests in the show, is the funny version of the story. “I could equally do a dramatic monologue with no jokes that you would find horrifying.”
So how did an aspiring actor from Surrey and his bookshop-owning dad came to run a strip club in the Costa del Sol? While Goldstein was at Warwick University, his parents’ marriage hit the rocks. His dad went out with a friend to a strip club, they “had a brilliant time” and decided to set up their own version in Marbella. It took a year to build it. By which time Goldstein was out of university and in need of a job.
“It just didn’t seem real,” he says. At least until the day he auditioned some girls at a motorway hotel. “It’s a very odd scenario to audition strippers with your dad,” he says.
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“I don’t know what Peter Stringfellow’s life was like before, but to go from being well-educated, middle-class, naive, to being in a hotel room with young girls. . .” He and his dad — “a genuinely lovely man, really sweet” — were nervous and unsure of the etiquette.
“I remember we had a chat with this girl, she was very nice, and then my dad said, ‘Have you brought something to show us?’ She said, ‘Yes, I have.’ And then she went into the bathroom and came out in lingerie. And we just went: ‘Yep, that’s nice, thank you very much’ and then she went and got changed again. Is that what a father and son should do together?”
As a young man full of awkwardness and feminist theory, he literally didn’t know where to look when his father took him on his first research trip, to Stringfellows. He was determined that the girls wouldn’t think he was objectifying them. So he decided to look them in the eyes.
“She would be waving her bum in my face and I’d be: ‘I’m looking in your eyes, I’m looking in your eyes . . .’ One girl said to me: ‘Look at my ass.’ I was going, ‘I shouldn’t, it’s disrespectful. . .’ And she was like: ‘This is what I’m doing! It’s disrespectful not looking at me!’ I found it stressful getting a lap dance.”
He went to Marbella, he admits, with certain expectations of strippers, “that they must have dad issues, or come from a broken home”. He found a wider spectrum of human existence than he’d expected: and, indeed, he’s still friends with some of the girls.
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What he found, though, was that the job itself was damaging. The girls all came out saying they would just do a month, make a bit of money, get out while the going was good. They’d all still be there six months later.
“The reason the job is dangerous is, it’s not about the dancing. The getting naked is the least of it. The way you make money is sitting down and making a man fall in love with you. You get a regular, you sit with him, you’re like a psychiatrist.
“You laugh at all his jokes, you make him feel special, he falls in love with you, he pays you £500 to sit there, he comes again and he comes again. It’s a really tricky game, though, because you sort of have to make him think that one day he’ll sleep with you. Without sleeping with him. Because if you do sleep with him he’s not going to be a regular any more.”
Which messes with the dancer’s head as well as the punter’s. “Yeah, because in some cases they do fall in love.” Some relationships sprang up between clients and strippers. They rarely worked out. “Because they’d fallen in love with a fantasy. And they weren’t this fantasy, they were just this girl in a tracksuit.”
He believes that the club caused a lot of damage. “All these middle-aged expats came, gorged themselves and then went, ‘Oh no, what have I done?’ If I were ever on Mastermind my specialist subject would be Midlife Crisis Male.”
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And has it been hard for Goldstein’s parents to see all this re-enacted? Well, he wrote the show on two conditions. The first was that his parents gave it their blessing. They did. The second was that they promised never to come and see it. They haven’t.
“Because if I knew they were coming, I’d write it differently. My sister’s seen it and she’s said, ‘I think that they could see it.’ Maybe they could. But I don’t think that I could perform it.”
Was it as character-building as the title implies? “I think I’m f***ed because of it,” he says with a chuckle. “No, it affected my world view in a good way and a bad way. But if I’m honest I think it made me not trust people a lot. Because you’re watching people trick people all day. Both men and women. Everything is real and everything is fake.”
So growing up in a strip club made him cynical, then? “Yes.” About women, or about everybody? “About women, about everybody.” He’s had relationships since, he says, although he has “definite commitment issues” — but then he’s not the only good-looking 30-year-old performer to have those.
Is he in a relationship now? “It would be nice if you could say that he’s having a healthy relationship now. But you can’t! Unfortunately you can’t say that.”
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While he tours this show, he’s putting together his next Edinburgh show. It’s about pornography. “And it’s a really hard one to get right,” says Goldstein. “I’ve done two previews and they’ve both been exactly like the stripping show was when I started it: no one’s listening, they all think I’m being a lad.
“There’s a personal element to it, and it’s hard talking about ... masturbating. There was a moment, the first time I did it, where I just stopped the show and said, ‘I don’t think I’ve thought this through.’ It’s weird talking to a roomful of strangers about this.”
He offers a self-deprecating smile. “And it’s harder with this show because I haven’t worked in pornography with my dad.”
Brett Goldstein Grew Up in a Strip Club is touring to March 31; brettgoldstein.co.uk