The Screen Test at Seven Dials Playhouse: Laughing Through the Collapse

Rated 🍯🍯🍯

Bebe Cave as Betsy Bitterly in The Screen Test. Photo by Kat Gollock

There is a particular kind of theatre that sneaks up on you, disguising its horror as humour, its descent as farce…

The Screen Test at the Seven Dials Playhouse was one of the most impressively sustained one-woman performances the bee has witnessed in recent memory. Bebe Cave, as the delusionally ambitious starlet Betsy Bitterly, was relentless, zipping through the evening with the kind of manic energy that could power the West End grid for a week. If keeping an audience engaged was the assignment, Cave passed with flying colors.

But what, exactly, was this play doing?

The Comedy That Wasn’t for Everyone

The theatre, it must be said, was shaking with laughter. The bee, however, sat rather still, caught in the uncomfortable space between amusement and horror. The humor leaned heavily on slapstick—a reliance on physicality, clumsiness, and the absurdity of a person so deeply entrenched in their own fantasy that reality became secondary. But if one was expecting sharp satire or comedy that cut with a little more precision, they might have left disappointed. The jokes, while effective for the crowd, felt familiar. Watching a character blithely tumble through their own self-made disasters, blissfully unaware of their impending doom — unfortunately, not the bee’s cup of tea, but the bee could see that Screen Test might well be some audience’s idea of comic gold. If you’re the type who prefers your satire with teeth, however, the play might have felt a touch… declawed.

Delusion: A Well-Worn Path

Now, here’s where things got interesting. Betsy Bitterly was, in many ways, an archetype—the deluded starlet, blind to her own mediocrity, convinced that the universe owed her an Oscar, twisting every failure into a victory in her mind. The bee initially found something compelling in the sheer scale of her self-deception. But we have seen this trope before, in film, in literature, in theatre. A dreamer builds a castle in the sky; reality comes knocking; the castle crumbles. If the play was aiming to shed light on the dangers of self-delusion, it did so competently but without particular novelty. If it was aiming for satire, it missed the mark—the character was so insular, so self-obsessed, that it never quite expanded beyond her to skewer anything larger than her own absurdity. A proper satire should cut into something bigger: Hollywood’s exploitative machine, perhaps, or society’s obsession with fame. Here, the focus never strayed far from Betsy’s personal spiral, which—while compelling—did not elevate itself beyond the individual.

The Horror Beneath the Humour

And yet.

The longer the bee sat with the play, the more it began to feel like an unintentional meditation on something far more insidious than mere delusion. Betsy’s arc—her unwavering resistance to reality, her refusal to admit that she might not be destined for greatness, her ability to twist every setback into a new delusion—felt eerily reminiscent of a different kind of psychological phenomenon. The bee was not watching satire. It was watching slow-motion psychological collapse, dressed up in a laugh track.

It is a known pattern: when the mind begins to unravel, it does not do so neatly. People slipping into despair often laugh off their problems, insist that nothing is wrong, rewrite their own narratives to preserve whatever fragile sense of identity they have left. Because to admit the truth—to confront the chasm beneath them—is to become someone else entirely. And so they cling. They dig in their heels. They rewrite reality, even as the walls close in. Betsy’s story was not just a comedy of errors. It was, in its own way, a horror story, softened only by the way the play framed it in humor.

Final Verdict: A Three-Star Spiral

So where does that leave The Screen Test? As a feat of performance, it was remarkable. As an evening of entertainment, it was a crowd-pleaser. As an exploration of delusion, it was well-crafted, visceral and stirring, even if somewhat predictable. And as an unwitting portrait of psychological unraveling, it was almost profound.

Three stars, then, for a play that may not have broken new ground, but still left the bee with plenty to chew on.

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The Screen Test is at the Seven Dials Playhouse through 15 February 2025.