Bette/Cavett - Herald Scotland | Arts & Ents | Stage & Visual Arts

Bette/Cavett - Herald Scotland Arts & Ents Stage & Visual Arts

Bette/Cavett *****
Keith Bruce
Published on 8 Oct 2009
With this one show, the somewhat debatable aggregation of events that flies under the Glasgay! banner is justified. Devised and directed by Grant Smeaton, and produced by his Tangerine company, this “re-imagining” of the 1971 US TV talk show encounter between Dick Cavett and straight-talking Hollywood dame Bette Davis is a triumph and a delight. There is the cleverness of its reference points for a start. Obviously there’s Peter Morgan’s hugely successful play and film Frost/Nixon, to which this is a hilarious camp response, but more widely there is the whole world of verbatim theatre, usually so po-faced, which the show embraces.

Smeaton is, of course, Bette herself, although he looks nothing like her (who does?), Mark Prendergast an equally well-observed and recreated Dick Cavett. Both inhabit their characters with some of the most relaxed naturalistic acting I’ve ever seen. Within minutes we are not watching a performance but being the studio audience almost 40 years ago, as Cavett goes into his warm-up routine with a Q&A on the life of Bette. (This being Glasgay!, there is, of course, one bloke who knows way too much.) When the programme begins, and as the chat between the two unfolds with careful concern for period detail, it is inevitable that all sorts of questions about the changing nature of celebrity should bubble to the surface.

The same attention to the minutiae distinguishes set and costumes, as well as, hilariously, the advertisements, screened on two televisions on either side of the stage, to which Cavett is obliged to cut at regular intervals. Glasgay! should be proud to have this, because if Smeaton had taken his show to the Fringe, I’d wager it would be playing the West End by now.

Bette/Cavett,
Tron, Glasgow