The rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford is the stuff of Hollywood legend, a decades-long feud that began in 1935 when Davis became involved with Crawford's fiancé and reached its zenith during the filming of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962. Anton Burge's Bette & Joan, receiving its Australian premiere at Ensemble Theatre, promises to excavate the vulnerability and venom beneath the legendary animosity.
The casting of Jeanette Cronin and Lucia Mastrantone represents a shrewd pairing of Australian theatre royalty to embody Hollywood's most notorious duel. Cronin, fresh from Dark Voyager and The Cavalcaders, takes on Davis, the self-proclaimed actress with Broadway credentials who sneered at the term "movie star." Mastrantone, whose recent work includes Master Class and Belvoir's Looking for Alibrandi, plays Crawford, the glamorous Kansas-born former MGM contract player whose carefully constructed image masked deeper insecurities.
Director Liesel Badorrek brings experience with intimate character studies to the material. Her previous work at Ensemble includes The Half-Life of Marie Curie and The Glass Menagerie, both productions requiring delicate handling of complex women navigating constrained circumstances. The director's observation that the play explores "so much more than a little feud" suggests a production interested in the systemic forces that pitted these women against each other as much as their personal animosity.
Burge's play, first staged in 2011 at London's Arts Theatre before recent revivals at the Park Theatre, sets the action entirely within the two divas' adjoining dressing rooms on the Baby Jane set. This confined space creates the theatrical equivalent of a pressure cooker, forcing confrontations that historical accounts suggest were carefully avoided through much of the actual filming. The structure allows for both bitchy exchanges when the women cross paths and confessional monologues delivered directly to the audience. The feud becomes inseparable from the misogyny that shaped both women's careers, creating conditions where their rivalry served studio interests more than their own.
Cronin's description of offering audiences "a backstage pass into the dressing room of two titans of the silver screen...the goddess of grit meets the goddess of glam" captures the play's essential dynamic. Davis cultivated an image as serious actress who could match male counterparts in intensity and ambition, while Crawford embodied Hollywood glamour and star quality. These competing visions of what female success looked like inevitably created friction in an industry with limited space for powerful women.
The creative team assembled for the Australian premiere brings considerable expertise to realising the period world. Grace Deacon's set and costume design must create the glamour of Golden Age Hollywood while Kelsey Lee's lighting design helps establish the theatrical duality between public performance and private vulnerability. Cameron Smith's video design and Ross Johnston's original compositions suggest production values extending beyond simple two-hander minimalism.
The 1962 setting places both women at crucial career crossroads. Davis was 54, Crawford 56, ages that in contemporary Hollywood ended most actresses' leading roles. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? represented a potential career resurgence for both, making the stakes of their rivalry particularly high. The film's surprise success proved audiences would watch older women in complex roles, though Hollywood learned this lesson slowly.
The historical record confirms the feud's reality while debate continues about specific incidents. Davis allegedly kicked Crawford during filming; Crawford supposedly wore lead weights under her costume to make carrying her more difficult; each actress lobbied against the other receiving an Oscar nomination. Whether all these stories are true matters less than what they reveal about how women were expected to compete rather than collaborate.
The play's two-hour-plus running time indicates a substantial work that develops its characters beyond caricature. The best writing about famous feuds recognises that genuine human complexity underlies the public drama, and that neither party is simply villain or victim. Burge's script has proven to achieve this balance, creating sympathy for both women while not excusing their behaviour.
For an Ensemble Theatre audience, Bette & Joan offers an opportunity to see two accomplished Australian actors tackle roles requiring technical skill alongside emotional depth. Playing icons means navigating audience expectations while creating believable human beings. The challenge lies in finding the real women beneath decades of biographical myth-making.
Bette & Joan runs March 20 to April 25 at Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli.
Tickets and more info: https://www.ensemble.com.au/shows/bette-and-joan/
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