FringeReview UK 2024

Bette and Joan

Brighton Little Theatre

Genre: Comedic, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Brighton Little Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

If the last line’s unrepeatable, the first is a flowery bouquet of self-love. How we get there is embedded in two actors giving here two phenomenal performances. Anton Burge’s 2011 Bette and Joan explodes in this BLT production directed by Ann Atkins: who knows exactly when to let the production pause for a breathless second, and let it rip.

1962, the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? where Bette Davis (Emmie Spencer) has been of all things headhunted by Joan Crawford (Bridgett Ane Lawrence, straight from NVT’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses). It’s usually serious actor Davis who spies a good script.

But she has to credit mere star Crawford for knocking on her door whilst she plays in Tennessee Williams’ 1961 Night of the Iguana and begging her to read. Davis is so grateful she snatches the script and slams the door.

We see it recalled later on in one of the few flashbacks. Mostly it’s a day in shooting, and between acts one of the most climactic, given an extra twist by Crawford.

For now though Crawford’s all svelte as Lawrence dresses, undresses, flexes her body and talks of keeping up a good tone with plenty of sex. Her life, her regimes are controlled, every surface meticulously kept, whereas chain-smoking Davis is another matter. The first of two acts gives most to Lawrence’s Crawford, whilst Spencer’s Davis perhaps dominates the second half.

Crawford, so grateful to her fans, so ‘bless’ every time she signs a photo (Davis would probably tear one up, write obscenities and post the bits rather than sign) has made frequent overtures, gifts and peace-offerings to Davis, whom she’s had little to do with, but knows despises her. There’s a limit though.

As the drama unfurls with black comedic feints and sallies mirroring the ink-black heart of the film, we see cruelties edge in. Davis ambushes Crawford with script cuts and scene-shoot reversals. Crawford revenges herself with a belt. You’ll see why.

The second act peels layers to even Davis’s vulnerability. The love of her life – she’s not had much fun – director William Wyler, for instance. Her traumatised sister and the mother she still fights for. The fathers that walked out of both future actors’ lives, their different responses to substitute fathers in Hollywood moguls who always cast aside their adopted daughters in the end.

Crawford’s love and lust was Clark Gable and she’d swap her first three husbands for a mere moment with him, who died the previous year. Not her fourth though, the Pepsi-Cola president with whom she was happy till he died. At one moment, Davis brings on a Coca-Cola dispenser to the set. It’s like that.

Steven Adams’ set is quite superb. A twin-set of mirrored star changing rooms features props quoting from the film: Crawford’s stage-left is a meticulous affair, every corner a hymns to clean regimes of living. Davis is subtly different: there’s a doll on a small plinth downstage highlighting the totemically malign character and a bit of Bette too.

Beverley Grover’s lighting (and sound) opens out the upstage into a luminous royal blue though Crawford’s side goes suddenly rose. Occasionally a film-clip is projected on the backstage wall. Upstage behind the cubicles with their respective doors a corridor allows both stars to bang on their colleagues’ doors; and other crew members to pose briefly as crew. Here too Mike Skinner takes on his brief telling role as director Robert Aldrich.

The plot-points of each star seeking advantage over the other creates the dramatic arc for vulnerabilities to dangle; like low-hanging poisoned fruit.  Each monologue’s echoed by something in the other’s, as if overheard (and occasionally they are).

The rebuffed Crawford seeks a single revenge and several reconciliations, Davis a series of dismissals in one-liners she simply can’t help. Yet alone, they’re  more warmly appraising. Can they ever be friends?

Spencer drawls David with supreme nonchalance and a carapace of hard-as-nails, wisecracking regret in a glaze that cracks a little. Spencer’s ability  to concentrate the Davis pace as well as tone, her glint of malice and her brief weary admissions, are beautifully calibrated.

Lawrence is  ideally-cast as rippling, intensely insecure Crawford: someone whose control-freakery Davis plays on to cruel heights, upsetting her regime with a phone-call. Lawrence stiffens into almost crazed disbelief at the latest stratagem, but can rally. Crawford is one who knows she’s up against a talent greater than her own – she invited it – and has only her frantically-toned professionalism and beauty between her and the last paycheque. Which she knows is the same for Davis, Broadway or not.

Davis proudly reflects she was the only actor not to use the casting couch: no conventional beauty, her talent was uniquely her passport. But there’s a terrible equality looming.

The play itself is a ripple of wisecracks: though there’s few surprises and a conventional structure with the chief innovation a double fourth-wall where the stars speak out to us, every line crackles with delivery; and the end satisfies.

Outstanding performances, an outstanding set too. As one director said, this production’s more compelling than the original 2011-12 seen touring at Brighton in 2012. The very intimacy of the space, with pitch-perfect acting, makes this an even finer vehicle for the play.

Published March 7, 2024March 7, 2024 by Simon Jenner