Review: BETTE AND JOAN, Park Theatre

It’s tempting to think that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are somewhat forgotten, films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane no longer in Friday’s midnight movie slot on BBC1 but somewhere closer to the shouty preachers in the bigger numbers on your remote control.

It’s a jolt to be reminded that Faye Dunaway’s terrifying face in the infamous biopic, Mommie Dearest, is now 43 years in the past. But the odd couple were, well, there’s no other adjective, so iconic, that Bette and Joan has Park Theatre’s House Full notices up for its full run. Somewhere they’re both smirking about that as they plot their revenge on Ms Dunaway and many more.

Not including, one suspects, Anton Burge, who serves both the actress, Miss Davis, and the star, Miss Crawford, well in his 2011 two-hander that throttles back on the grotesque in favour of, if not quite sympathy, then certainly empathy, for two women as tough and as ruthless as anyone had to be to survive in the bearpit of Hollywood’s Golden Age.  

We join the fading (and acutely fearful of the description turning to faded) Academy Award winners in their back-to-back dressing rooms on a remote lot at Warner Brothers, both feeling the sting of finding themselves in (literally) B movie territory. Both into their 50s in a town that worships youth and has little use for women past 30, and after years without a hit, they know this is probably their last chance to sip from the poisoned chalice of fame with its addictive nectar. And they know that the film has a real chance with its gothic horror script and perfect casting. The stakes are high.

But they hate each other - have done for years. Is there just enough stick (oncoming oblivion) and carrot (a grudging respect born in the knowledge of how hard are the roads they’ve travelled) to get them through? Across two hours of bitching, baiting and brawling, we find out.

Shows like this live or die on the performances. Felicity Dean catches La Crawford’s all-consuming insecurity, the country girl with no acting training who caught the breaks and clung on to make it, with her Oscar to prove it. Whether it’s taking phone calls from dodgy fans, signing avalanches of publicity photos or recounting the failures of her many husbands, she needs affirmation. Dean, in a succession or drop-dead gorgeous, accurately too-tight, dresses gives us that fragile diva, but she also shows us the damage too - the skill lies not in making us believe in this Joan, it’s in making us not hate her. 

Greta Scacchi has a different job to do with Bette, as it’s impossible not to warm to her chutzpah. Firing up the cigarettes between the wisecracks and the putdowns, she’s all blustery New England confidence (two Oscars for her) but she’s bitter about the lesser actress, Joan, usurping her with her superficial qualities of looks and PR. Feisty and foulmouthed (don’t miss the killer last line), Scacchi’s transformation into Baby Jane is remarkable and, if there’s an occasional hesitation in the line readings, it doesn’t matter as we’re marvelling at this extraordinary sight before us.

Has much changed since 1962? On the one hand, Nicole Kidman is older now than either Bette or Joan when they made Baby Jane, and on the other, …Harvey Weinstein. 

Those thoughts do bubble to the surface but they’re more reflections on the journey home. During Sue Jenkins’s fast-paced production, we’re too busy laughing at Joan’s latest old-fashioned look, a glare prompted by Bette’s latest coarseness or at Bette’s gleeful airing of another past triumph at Joan’s expense. 

Two cats in a bag they may be, but it’s fun watching the fur fly - we can’t help thinking that they probably wouldn’t want it any other way. 

Bette and Joan at Park Theatre until 11 January

Photo Credits: Simon Annand

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