Bette/Cavett

Entering in dark furs and dark glasses, Grant Smeaton’s Bette Davis is a trashy diamonique time capsule of everything the seventies stood for.

Bette/Cavett, Tangerine Productions’ contribution to the Glasgay! Festival, is a well-observed recreation of Bette Davis’s candid 1971 interview on the Dick Cavett Show.

With little more than a few leather couches and an ashtray, the Changing Room of the Tron is transformed, as audience and actor come together to discuss the golden days of cinema and the industry's decay.

The hour-long interview covers the insular nature of Hollywood as seen through the eyes of one of its most successful names. In a comedy of manner, if not one of manners, Bette discusses everything from losing her virginity to being attack by wasps in Glasgow. The selection of original dialogue provides a great sense of poetry. The piece seeks to slide down the rose-tinted Chanel sunglasses of our perceptions of “the old days” and challenge our tendency, and that of Bette, to glamorise the past.

Every ten minutes or so, the inaction breaks and a “station commercial” is shown on one of two little televisions. The political incorrect advertisements, promoting things such as a diet plan called Ayds and a country club full of people enjoying the taste of cigarettes, show that life is not the way it used to be.

Grant Smeaton’s Bette Davis provides the wonderful kind of grotesque spectacle that can only be channelled through a man in too much make-up. It would be impossible to guess how many hours the actor and director has sat in front of YouTube, observing the grand gestures and vocals inflexions of a great Hollywood starlet, and the effect is most convincing. Dolled up in deep red lipstick, sprayed with glittering jewellery and with a blanched face to match Blanche Hudson, Smeaton’s illusion captures something very raw and visceral about the ageing Davis.

Alongside every ponderous star, there must be a host with the question cards. Mark Pendergast’s Dick Cavett epitomises a delightfully 1970s television personality who might not be all that familiar to British audiences. Engaging the crowd in a short quiz at the opening of the piece, he casually moves aside the fourth wall, creating an instant rapport between audience and actor that lasts throughout. Sitting on the same stage as a man dragged up as Bette Davis cannot be an easy task, but his sweet nature and charming presence ensures that this is not just a one-girl show.

This is the kind of excellent experimental theatre that the Glasgay! Festival so readily encourages, and which the audience adored. Baby Jane is alive and well at the Tron.