The Ensemble’s witty, razor-sharp Bette & Joan takes centre stage this month, plunging headfirst into the legendary rivalry between two of Hollywood’s most iconic stars. A high voltage duet about power, ambition and the high cost of staying visible played out in the tabloids and the dressing room. The famous feud is the hook, but Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are the story. 

Davis and Crawford are filming Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and Anton Burge wastes no time revealing what he’s really interested in: the distance between the woman in the mirror and the myth on the screen. He builds their portraits as adjoining‑room confessions, using split symmetrical dressing rooms, direct address and intersecting monologues that let the women reveal themselves in fragments — their deadly intelligence, their relentless work ethic, their private insecurities. When they finally cross paths, it’s electric.

Under Liesel Badorrek’s fiercely nuanced direction, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford circle as titans, never yielding ground. She threads their power plays with an instinctive grasp of metaphor and story, and a real delight in the language and theatricality of film. The unmasking is the real charge: wigs off, scotch poured and battle scars on display.

Davis and Crawford lived through lenses: the camera’s, the public’s, and their own unforgiving internal ones. It’s a fascinating study of reflection and projection within the intimate symmetry of their dressing room mirrors and rituals. Video Designer Cameron Smith intensifies this tension by stretching their smallest confessions into beautifully mounted, towering black and white closeups. Turning intimate disclosures into something monumental and painfully exposed as the women speak onstage, revealing how each lived in a state of double exposure — the public figure and the private self. A magnetic effect that feels as close as we may ever come to the real Bette and Joan.

Jeanette Cronin and Lucia Mastrantone are nothing short of incandescent, fearlessly stepping into the armour and acid of Hollywood’s most formidable legends. They never chase mimicry; they find the fault-line between the screen persona and the woman who had to live inside it. What a combination! Two virtuosos whose brilliance feeds off the other. 

Mastrantone’s Joan is exquisitely modulated, every word and gesture pre-approved and polished.  When the script in her head finally slips, the woman underneath flashes out. She is deadly funny in her brittle precision, never breaking the architecture of the icon but letting the humour seep through the poise. Her smooth malice and tightly held charm reveal both the star and the woman who lived in a constant state of permanent, angst- ridden performance.

Cronin’s Bette carries a volatile intensity, all weaponised mannerisms, clipped rhythms, and a weary stare that sizes up the world before it can answer back. She moves with the force of someone who has fought for every inch of her career, yet the cracks in her armour are unmistakable. Cronin reveals the woman behind the combativeness, the artist who fears the long fade to black, and the mother who never felt entirely cast in the right role. Her Bette is ferocious, dryly humorous, and unexpectedly moving – the actor whose power is inseparable from the vulnerability she works so hard to conceal.

A big part of the kick is the humour, which hits with real accuracy — and the tongue‑in‑cheek camp, served with just enough side‑eye to keep it delicious. Their clashes are edged with a pithy, biting edge that emerges organically — never forced, always driven by character.

 Also on show is the treasure hunt of MGM era nuggets, that reward anyone who knows the codes and the poses these women had to master. It reminds us that Bette and Joan were not fragile rivals but tough, witty, battle‑forged broads who understood the game better than the men running it. Underneath it all, they wanted the same thing — to be liked, to be loved, to be allowed in. They could have been allies, even friends, if top billing hadn’t been the only prize on offer.

Bold, blistering and beautifully human, Bette & Joan lets the legends play while ensuring the women beneath are impossible to ignore. Two legends, two powerhouse performances – one unmissable night. Go see it.