Bette & Joan: A Wickedly Entertaining Clash That Quietly Stings

A wickedly entertaining face-off, Anton Burge’s Australian premiere of Bette & Joan is camp, razor-sharp and, in the hands of two exceptional performers, a lot more moving than expected.

By 1962, Hollywood had written off Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The studio system that manufactured their stardom had declared them two “old broads” in the words of Warner Bros. boss Jack Warner, still capable of brilliance but inconvenient to admit it.

Robert Aldrich‘s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? threw them together one last time on a B-picture soundstage. While the film became a cult classic, what happened behind the cameras was, if anything, the better story.

Burge’s play plants us squarely in that world. Two dressing room vanities, two women in half-finished screen makeup, sharpening their claws before another day’s shoot.

The schemes are petty and perfect: intercepted phone calls to the head office, quietly undermined reputations, compliments with a blade tucked inside. It is camp, catty and deeply entertaining, but the script earns its laughs honestly and the moments of real human pain land harder for it.

These are two traumatised women with the same goal and wildly different ways of getting there, not opposites but mirrors, and the play is at its most alive when it lets them bounce off each other.

Jeanette Cronin‘s Davis is marvellous, ferocious and gumptious up front with something tender and genuinely fragile bleeding through as the night wears on, the grizzled ask-for-nothing actress rendered without a whiff of caricature.

Lucia Mastrantone‘s Crawford is a different kind of pleasure, a lilting voice that teeters on the edge of a screech, equal parts charming and razor-sharp, her prim and meticulously manufactured glamour a barely concealed suit of armour.

Together they run delightful rings around each other with perfectly timed jabs and the easy friction of the best of frenemies.

The production’s finest moment arrives when the weapons finally come down, a boozy yap that is lighter than everything surrounding it and far more revealing of just how much these two women need each other.

The production is immersive and dreamy without being indulgent.

Black and white interview vignettes intercut the action like fragments of memory, fracturing the timeline and lending the show a genuinely cinematic quality. Lighting pivots between warm wash and sharp spotlight with real intention.

The fourth wall breaks freely throughout, each woman drawing us conspiratorially into her corner, closing only when they finally share the same space.

Under Liesel Badorrek‘s direction these elements work in concert rather than competition, and the rhythm between the two leads crackles from start to finish.

The rapid-fire dialogue and Mid-Atlantic drawls take some getting used to, and at two hours, the uninitiated may find it winding. An essential watch for Old Hollywood obsessives and presumably the gays, this is a show that rewards those who arrive already a little in love with both women.

Witty, venomous and emotional in equal measure, Bette & Joan belongs to its two stars, who, much like the women they play, are impossible to take your eyes off of.

Bette & Joan is running till 25 April at Ensemble Theatre.