The Screen Test

Edinburgh Fringe – The Pleasance

All that glisters is not gold in Bebe Cave’s The Screen Test, as she peels back the curtain on the mirage created by history and myth surrounding the film industry in the mid-1900s.

Aspiring actress Betsy Bitterly (Cave) dreams of making it big in 1930s Hollywood. After signing onto a major studio, she undertakes a number of screen tests, each one bringing her closer to her big break and dream, or so she believes. It’s a story about dreams, delusion and fame pushed to the extreme. 

What starts off as a very matter-of-fact commentary on the culture of movie sets and treatment of actresses, quickly spirals and becomes less about the careful narrative and social construct and more about the unraveling of this dream, a shift reflected in Cave’s performance. There are many just tongue-in-cheek moments that entertainingly poke fun at the culture of the 1930s and are perhaps the moments of strength in this show, but these are eventually phased out as it becomes more character focused. 

Stepping into this character comedy, we feel like we know what we might expect. Cave creates an atmosphere where even in the darkest moments of this dark comedy we’re able to find some light, some laughter. She blows our assumptions out of the water and gives an absolutely stunning performance that manages to hit the perfect spot between sincerity and comedy. This character is so over-exaggerated with all the stereotypes from the Golden Age of cinema that she becomes real. It’s almost like seeing a comic caricature or amalgamation of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Vivienne Leigh all at once, but without the cutesy, Pan-American, patriarchal, rose-tinted lens through which their stories are often told. 

“an absolutely stunning performance that manages to hit the perfect spot between sincerity and comedy”

The challenge that Cave faces with the presentation and direct-speech approach of The Screen Test, is flagging the change between narration of events and Betsy’s internal monologue. There are extended periods where this difference becomes unclear, where Betsey’s narration of events and her internal monologue diverge. It’s mostly because we don’t get a lot of clues from Cave herself, she doesn’t map out the character’s emotional journey through her facial expressions or body language particularly clearly; she almost has a permanently guileless demeanour that does not vary much. Despite suiting the character, it’s not particularly helpful for us and our understanding of The Screen Test. Cave tells us a lot, but she doesn’t exactly show it. This ‘empty vessel’ has a lot of depth, but we only just scratch the surface of what we’re able to see from her. We like and laugh at the character because of the well-known archetype that Betsy represents, but when her facade starts to crack, it does go quite unnoticed.   

The Screen Test is an astounding critique of the romanticism of a period and culture that potentially transcends time as further analysis of the current arts industry, whether times have changed is something that edges into our subconscious over the course of this show. Hopefully this is only the beginning of Betsy Bittlerly’s and Cave’s long tenure on the stage.

By Katerina Partolina Schwartz

Photo Credit: Kat Gollock