Radio Bette, minus Ruth Negga, opens Dublin Theatre Festival with deadpan drollery
Radio Bette Gaiety Theatre ★★★★☆ Hit plays regularly used to migrate from stage to screen. These days it’s more common for films to be adapted for the theatre, often for the sake of creating a bankable star vehicle. In Radio Bette, the New York company the Goat Exchange take a more eccentric and ambitious approach. Much of the plot and dialogue comes from All About Eve, Joseph L Mankiewicz’s 1950 film starring Bette Davis as a Broadway matriarch with an obsessive young admirer. But the play, which opens this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival on Thursday night, is actually adapted from a later abbreviated radio adaptation featuring much of the same cast. That version was sponsored by the Lux soap brand. The action therefore begins with the first of numerous commercial messages exhorting housewives to stock up on “Lux flakes” (delivered with deadpan drollery by Paul Lazar as the host of Lux Radio Theatre). Meanwhile, a clutch of bored-looking performers dressed in leisurewear sit at a trestle table on a mostly empty stage. Early on there is some awkwardness as well as a painfully long pause. At least Michael Cerveris nails the withering hauteur of George Sanders ’s opening monologue (as the critic Addison DeWitt) about the topsy-turvy business of theatre. Then the whole show appears to fall apart. Given that the production lost its star, Ruth Negga , during rehearsals, additional bad luck hardly comes as a surprise. But that calamity turns out to be a witty, self-referential feint. Thereafter, Chloe Claudel (who also directs with Mitchell Polonsky) grabs hold of the central role of Eve, at once channelling Anne Baxter ’s deceptive ingenuousness in the film and adding a vein of offbeat comic energy. As Bette Davis playing Eve’s idol, Margo Channing, Marcus Amaglo has an air of imperious dignity while also bringing out the ageing star’s vulnerability. And yet, notwithstanding its title, Radio Bette is even more about Eve than the film, thanks to Claudel’s sublime versatility. As the neophyte worms her way into Margo’s life, the play both builds in intensity and becomes increasingly weird. The drab costumes evolve into exuberant configurations, and the soundtrack features a series of Disco classics. Marilyn Monroe even makes an appearance as a ventriloquist’s puppet. Then we witness a play within the play about Queen Elizabeth I’s putative romance with Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, that sends up the mannered conventions of 1950s period drama. Some of the supporting characters lose a bit of definition amid the hubbub. The other six cast members nonetheless provide the two leading ladies with a reliable collective foil. All this is performed in a spirit of arch defamiliarisation reminiscent of the quirky adaptations of classic literary works (notably Gatz, an eight-hour version of The Great Gatsby that appeared at this festival in 2008) staged by the New York ensemble Elevator Repair Service . But whereas ERS tend to combine inventive stagecraft with meticulous fidelity to the text, Radio Bette brings out the reworkings and distortions inherent within the process of adaptation. Though the 90-minute staging eschews technology, it seems at home in the era of the mash-up and the supercut. Radio Bette is at the Gaiety Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival , until Sunday, September 27th