To readers of a certain age, the very mention of Baby Jane may send a chill up the spine.

For those who remember Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the 1962 horror-thriller, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? the name conjures up one of the most celebrated villains of the screen, once ranked in the American Film Institute’s list of the 50 Best Villains of American Cinema.

Now director Ed Wightman has gone back to the original 1960 novel by American writer Henry Farrell and devised a play simply called Baby Jane, taking the stage at Canberra Repertory. 

Like the movie, the play involves Baby Jane, a former famous child actress, tormenting her disabled older sister Blanche, who had been a Hollywood star – what could possibly go wrong?

Wightman, billed by Rep as “one of Canberra’s-own”, is one of our proudest products, an ANU Arts/Law graduate and local theatre luminary who, armed with a Canberra Rep scholarship, went to the London School of Academy of Drama and Music and won the David Suchet scholarship. He now has a busy career in Sydney directing, teaching at NIDA and writing.

“I’d always been fascinated by the film,” he tells me. “But on reading the credits I got even more interested in the novel behind it and found that Farrell had written a couple of other books and worked on turning Baby Jane into a stage play.” That never happened.

“Writing the play became my pandemic project, a lifeline for me during covid… I found that the script came up quickly, allowing me to create some frightening parts but a vein of black comedy, too.” 

“Most people know the title but not the story,” he says, explaining that the film’s notoriety was related to the reputed clash between Davis and Crawford. “Happily, we haven’t had any of that to deal with.”

Convinced that it would work well on stage, he looked around for potential producers and found Rep to be supportive of development workshops, eventually programming it for 2025.

This is Wightman’s sixth production for Rep and it was during a previous time there that several older actresses got into his ear and complained that there weren’t enough roles for them.

“So, I decided to come up with two challenging roles for older female actresses,” he says. Mind you, Louise Bennett, who plays Jane, Victoria Tyrrell Dixon, who plays Blanche, are not quite as old as Davis and Crawford, both aged 54 when they played them.

The attraction for a playwright-director is to be found in the psychological explorations of sibling rivalry and the horror elements. 

Wightman differs from Farrell in focusing all the action in the house. The two reclusive, often delusional sisters have cut themselves off from the world and are living in a Hollywood mansion not unlike the setting for Sunset Boulevard.

There are other characters in the novel/play, including that of the sisters’ father who may or may not be real, but the focus is more on the two sisters.

They’ve been having fun in rehearsals because one of their cast, Michael Sparks, is a genuine American who’s been correcting Wightman’s small cultural lapses, such as using the word biscuit where cookies or cake would be more correct.

Wightman is adamant that this play is no slavish reproduction of the film, that it has more psychological realism and a bit less “arch” than the camped-up cult movie, so he’s been at pains to discourage both Bennett and Tyrrell Dixon from seeing the film, Davis and Crawford being such hard acts to follow.

And his ultimate purpose? As Rep is saying: “It’s designed to make you laugh, cry and jump out of your seat. Maybe even all at the same time.”

Baby Jane, Canberra Rep Theatre until March 8.