Focus on: Beth Vyse

Anyone who has witnessed Olive Hands, the alter ego of Beth Vyse, knows she's unfit to be a mother. Well, too late. Beth has a baby, and Olive isn't afraid to use him

feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 3 minutes
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Published 26 Jul 2018

Plenty of Fringe shows aspire to connect with our inner child. Few, though, are willing to risk sharing the spotlight with an actual breathing, bawling infant. Still, Henry is an old showbusiness hand – 15 months old in fact.

Appearing at the Machynlleth Festival at four weeks, he made his Soho Theatre debut less than two months later. “Discovered” at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe, when his mother took one of the pregnancy test kits she'd been using as a prop—“getting the audience to lick it”—he was, she calculates, “roughly conceived” at Latitude.

“I'd got drunk on gin with my partner Luke, Ali Brice and Spencer Jones. And the rest is history.”

Beth Vyse laughs about a double act that's doubling down on her surreal turn as deranged daytime TV host Olive Hands. Can a woman really have it all, both family and career, asks The Hand That Rocks the Cradle? Especially if that woman is a dissolute madwoman who only had a child to get back on television?

Vyse intended to perform a version of Rocks the Cradle at last year's Fringe, but postponed due to Luke's extreme ill health. And having previously devised an acclaimed standup hour about her breast cancer, she's overcome significant setbacks to flesh out the character of Olive, established piece by piece in former shows with more and more of her own biography.

“It's a heightened persona now,” she explains. “The character is filled with my life and child." Olive wants to be the greatest daytime television presenter of all time. But her shows always end up in a big mess. After fucking up the last time, she thought she'd have a baby who she could co-host with. She pitched it to ITV9, who loved it. What could possibly go wrong?

Prophetically, one of Olive's bygone degradations portrayed Les Dawson as the Angel of the North telling her that she would give birth to the greatest daytime television show host of all time. And with her high camp, leopardskin-sporting personality (at least partially based on Vyse's own mother) Olive is truly blurring fantasy, reality and outright lunacy.

“It's about being a real mum but still wanting your career,” Vyse reflects. “It's about me wanting to hold onto my old dreams instead of evolving with my child and discussing that problem.” Yet Olive also channels Vyse's Caesarean section into a gameshow; her “handmaiden” (Alwin Solanky of the Weirdos collective) is milked; acting advice that David Jason once gave Vyse is invoked; and there may even be another birth, live on air.

Meanwhile, there's a real child appearing on stage with its own agenda. As mime comic Trygve Wakenshaw delightfully showed last year, improvising around his baby son Phineas, that can make for some unpredictable but endearing memories. “I hope Henry has fun and remembers it,” Vyse says. “I'd never put him in a dangerous position. There's a childminder and Luke backstage. And the handmaiden onstage. So I can do my crazy thing while the baby is at the forefront of everyone's mind.

“But we don't know what will happen. There's definitely room for spontaneity and I'll go with him. The audience will wonder if he's my baby and whether I should be bringing him on. It opens a discussion up. But he's also that extra added element of surprise.”