Bette and Joan, Arts Theatre, London

Cutting edge: Anita Dobson as Joan Crawford and Greta Scacchi as Bette Davis

The Bette is Davis, the Joan is Crawford, and the occasion, in Anton Burge’s new play, is the filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the 1962 comeback movie for two stars past their heyday. The gag here is that, while the two conducted a venomous on-set relationship in character, backstage they were scarcely better behaved, infamously maintaining an icy feud that erupted into verbal and even physical assaults.

Burge’s play presents them in adjacent dressing rooms. Both peevish at being hidden away on a back lot at Warner Brothers studios, they come over as a pair of caged big cats. Crawford (Anita Dobson) preens and poses, issuing threats in a purr and padding elegantly around the confines of her room. Davis (Greta Scacchi), meanwhile, scowls and growls, banging about restlessly, lighting matches on the wall and snarling into the phone. We, the audience, play confidant to them both, as they bitch about each other, fret about their futures and unburden a little about what makes them tick.

They are delicious parts and Dobson and Scacchi bring tremendous flair and mischievous glee to them in Bill Alexander’s production. Dobson, as Crawford, is a hoot. Her monologues are peppered with commands down the phone (“no close-ups after 4.30”), self-affirming mantras (“wonderful to be a perfectionist”) and bizarre little insights into her personal life: after each husband left, she reveals, she changed the locks and the toilet seats, but kept them “a place in her heart”.

This delicious performance is nicely complemented by Scacchi’s straight-talking, irascible, foul-mouthed Davis, who chafes at Crawford’s grandeur and insincerity and reveals her own determination to go against the Hollywood grain and be a real actress. This, Burge suggests, is the real nub of the feud – not men, manners or make-up, but the fact that Davis considered herself an actress and Crawford a movie star. But he also suggests a grudging recognition between the women, both fighters, working hard in a fickle world. The play hampers itself, however, with its structure. It becomes repetitive, runs out of steam and the snippets of exposition and psychological insight are too often artificially and clumsily worked in. Thoughtful, then, and tartly funny, but not earth-shattering.

artstheatrewestend.com