‘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.
Sometimes the show feels too busy, or overstuffed, and it gets chaotic towards the end. Even acknowledging that neurosis is what The Screen Test wishes to convey, it could use breathing space – and I wondered what the show might be were Cave to tweak the dial away from monologue towards character comedy (loosening the chokehold of the script, letting a bit of herself in). With its lesser roles (her playboy husband Frankie chief among them) played by a headless shop-window dummy, the tale we’re told here is a familiar one. But it’s vividly inhabited in Cave’s telling – which amplifies ad absurdum the injustices of not-so-golden age sexism and the glorified vassalage of the studio system – and has wisecracks to burn.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 26 August
