Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Bebe Cave dazzles in a slightly overstuffed monologue about fame, sexism and power in Tinseltown
‘A person waiting to be asked to pretend to be a person.” It doesn’t sound like a condition conducive to mental wellbeing, does it? Such is the plight of one Betsy Bitterly, aspiring Hollywood star in Tinseltown’s prewar golden age, and the creation of actor Bebe Cave. The Screen Test is a monologue waiting to be asked to be a character comedy show, a cri de coeur dressed up as an intense hit of screwball depicting a starlet’s shallow rise and precipitous fall.
Appropriately, it’s a starry performance from Cave as frustrated Betsy, who spends the whole hour on the verge of a silver-screen fame that never quite materialises. She dances, she dazzles, she preens to another How to Be Beautiful instructional. She dispenses quip upon fast-talking quip after the Katherine Hepburn fashion. And after the cartoon fashion, too: this is a show when rival divas are taken out by falling anvils, and Betsy reacts to casting snubs by miming her own death under machine-gun fire. The character’s career may be in stasis (“I’m not bitter – I’m just souring slightly”), but Cave is rarely not on the move. As just a few years pass, she’s soon auditioning for mums not daughters, and her excuses for failure grow ever more delusional.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 26 August
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