This review is from 2011. Bette & Joan returns for 2024 with Greta Scacchi reprising her role as Bette Davis and Felicity Dean as Joan Crawford.
‘When you’ve got poached-egg eyes, an “Alice in Wonderland” neck and bad posture, you just have to be good,’ declares Bette Davis in Anton Burge’s drama. She’s played in Bill Alexander’s production by Greta Scacchi – who is, indeed, good. So is Anita Dobson as Joan Crawford, Davis’s co-star in ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane’, a rivetingly grotesque melodrama both hoped would revive flagging careers.
They famously loathed each other. So while it’s camp fun to watch Scacchi and Dobson being good, what we crave is Davis and Crawford being bad. Burge tantalises with some catty lines, but never really lets his leading ladies get their claws out.
The play consists chiefly of dressing-room monologues. Dobson decorously sips spiked Pepsi and coats her barbed bitcheries in saccharine; next door Scacchi smokes, swears and chuckles throatily at the pretensions of Crawford, rumoured to have bedded everyone at MGM ‘except Lassie’.
More interaction might have allowed fur to fly, and sneaking sympathies between these two tough old broads to emerge. In keeping them apart, Burge makes them appear flatter than they ever did on celluloid.