BETTE AND JOAN
BETTE AND JOAN, Ensemble Theatre, until 25 April 2026. Photography by Prudence Upton
In early 2015, Jeanette Cronin stepped on stage at the Old 505 as Bette Davis in a sharp solo show titled Queen Bette. It was her creation together with director Peter Mountford, and she was astonishing. She played the Hollywood goddess playing Elizabeth I as Davis had in 1939 in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and The Virgin Queen, in 1955, all the while weaving aspects of her life into the drama. For anyone who had seen Davis on screen, in those films or others, it was an uncanny performance, by turns funny and moving, and never less than riveting and real. (My review is in the archive here!)
So, what a pity that Ensemble Theatre chose to program this tin-eared piece by UK writer and playwright Anton Burge. He seems like a literary leech, having sucked theatre life out of women such as Mrs Pat (Penelope Keith), Storm in a Flower Vase (florist Constance Spry), and Fanny’s Burning! (TV cook Fanny Cradock), plus Diana Mosley, and, according to his agent’s website, books such as “A Life Lived in Melodrama: Bette Davis in 134 Characters… A book of studies and interviews of interpretations of Queen Elizabeth I: Portraying Elizabeth: Elizabeth I on Stage & Screen, interviewees including Anna Massey, Glenda Jackson, Dame Eileen Atkins, Miranda Richardson and Dame Harriet Walter…”
Unfortunate then, that Bette and Joan is such a lumpen thing, ranging chunkily across well-known gossip, rumour, more ancient gossip, and possibly the kind of material Vanity Fair describes as “flamboyant fan fiction masquerading as film history.” There are bits and pieces of known biography, plus presumably imagined exchanges between the two. These take place on stage in the setting of their dressing rooms on the backlot of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
The 1962 horror film was Crawford’s project, and some of the drama of its making is in the play. Not just the spats (never in public, mostly hearsay), but the struggle of older women in Hollywood to be respected by the misogynist studio system. They were in their mid-50s and had not worked in years, but Baby Jane was filmed in just two months, on a minuscule budget of $1m, recouped in its first week's screenings in New York and LA. The film is now recognised as an all-time great.
Meanwhile, Cronin and her co-star Lucia Mastrantone sit at dressing tables peering into the empty, brightly lit frames of backing mirrors. This idea (set designer Grace Deacon) works well enough in the first half, but in the second, the tables are wheeled centre-stage so those in the side blocks are looking at the back of one or the other. To alleviate the problem somewhat, director Liesel Badorrek has them corkscrewing this way and that from their chairs, also prowling or striding about the stage, but it makes for a static, awkward experience for actors and audience alike.
Visual interest or distraction – take your pick – comes from atmospheric live and pre-filmed B&W video clips of the actors by video designer Cameron Smith. And it’s not his fault they’re chopped up and weird as projected on the timber-squared back wall of the film set. At the same time, lighting designer Kelsey Lee adds movement and interest with well-aimed spots and black areas, and composer Ross Johnston washes what passes for action with some luscious Korngold-esque sound.
Catching up with the production on a two-thirds full Wednesday evening, almost two weeks into the run, could have meant one of two things: a show running as smoothly and confidently as a Rolls-Royce, or one that’s lost its oomph and has a flat tyre. Sadly, it was the latter and also, the ultra-gifted Mastrantone seemed lost and un-Crawford, despite the ever-present Pepsi bottle. As Davis, in Cronin’s experienced hands, is as convincing as she was a decade ago, it created a painful imbalance. Other members of the audience enjoyed themselves, I was bored to sobs, and sad.
