Arts, London
By 1962, two of the silver screen's great leading ladies, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, were has-beens. The women – both famed for playing strong independent characters, both with difficult personal lives and both a long way past 40 – had been replaced by a new breed of perky blonde stars. Then they got an unexpected opportunity: playing opposite each other in what was to become a cult classic, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
It says a great deal about how little the opportunities for female actors have changed in 50 years that Greta Scacchi (looking uncannily like Davis) and Anita Dobson (terrific as the manipulative Crawford) fall on their roles in this backlot two-hander like starving women who have not glimpsed meat for years. Because they have so much fun with the roles, we have fun, too, even if Anton Burge's script never digs far beneath the surface: it is little more than a rehash of old Hollywood gossip, buying unquestioningly into the idea that strong, successful women are all bitches at heart.
Still, bitching can be delicious when done with style. Here we have a delicate game of oneup-womanship, in which bared teeth are hidden behind dissembling smiles and barbed insults fly in both directions. "It's said she'd slept with everybody on the lot except Lassie," hisses Davis of her rival. There is plenty more like that; it is only a pity there is not more excavation of the emotional pain felt by these two icons, whose public success was matched by private disasters. But this kitsch play is not trying to be more than it is, and Scacchi and Dobson carry it with an alluringly wicked twinkle in their eyes.