Review: The Screen Test, Seven Dials Playhouse

Betsy Bitters (née Bitterly) is going to be a star. That’s what she tells herself, at least.

She has a few of the requisites to make it big. A humble backstory (grew up on a farm in London), a perilous journey (stowed away on a ship, hidden between Campbell’s soup crates), and a can-do attitude. Crucially, she also quickly learns that sometimes you have to push other people down to get a leg up. That’s showbiz, baby.

From the get-go, The Screen Test is captivating. Betsy (Bebe Cave) erupts onto the stage, large projections behind her instructing the audience to APPLAUD and THROW ROSES, an entrance setting the high-energy tone that persists through the 60-minute runtime.

That’s not to say the piece is one-note – far from it. This is a perfectly balanced show on several fronts, bouncing from scathing satire to comic genius and understated tragedy. Audience participation, notoriously difficult to do without disrupting the narrative flow or tone of a production, is executed with finesse. Cave’s occasional comments to or demands of the audience and situational ad libs are expertly timed, only adding to the complete hilarity of the play.

A performer has to be very good to play a poor actor. Betsy’s terrible accents during the screen tests (which sway between hammy and borderline incomprehensible), her exuberant interpretive dance, and her impassioned monologues could fall flat in the hands of a less capable actor. Cave makes it look easy.

At first, the story itself seems like a standard wannabe-starlet narrative, albeit one with excellent jokes, but it doesn’t take long for the absurdity to creep in. A rival actress meets a cartoonish demise when an anvil falls on her head. Betsy accidentally lets badgers into the house, again, and they try to eat her toes. Cary Grant is God. There’s a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, and it all sticks.

The futilities and indignities of Betsy’s mission, and life, are treated matter-of-factly, emphasising their awfulness. She discusses the degree to which she’ll allow a groping hand if it can help her up the ladder. Checked out on antidepressants and martinis, she finds tranquility in hours of vacuuming. She’s in a screen test to play a popular male actor’s ‘maternal’ love interest soon after auditioning to play his daughter. The horrors of 1930s Hollywood, and American society, are thoroughly scorned. At several points, they don’t feel that far from the terrors of 2025.

Each of Betsy’s roles, from Peasant Whore #3 to the ‘before’ character in an infomercial on how to be beautiful, from young schoolgirl (child) embarking on an affair with her teacher (very, very old) to frontier woman, is a well-constructed image of a familiar on-screen character. The attention to detail in every one of these, no matter how brief, is a testament to the piece’s construction.

Although Cave may be retiring The Screen Test, if any of her future work is even nearly as good as this, she’ll be more of a star than Betsy could ever imagine.

Written by: Bebe Cave

The Screen Test plays at Seven Dials Playhouse until 15 February.