Melita Jurisic as Mae West and Diana Glenn as Diane Arbus in Arbus & West (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Playwright Stephen Sewell has based this deftly crafted play on the real-life encounter between Arbus and West seven years earlier. An exploration of what really drives these two women, from different generations and very different backgrounds, it maintains tension and suspense, though some elements of the story are well known.

Show magazine had commissioned the New Yorker to photograph the legendary star at home in Santa Monica. Arbus, who had cut her teeth in commercial and fashion photography, was now breaking into an edgier world of greater creativity and had won a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. When she arrives, this cuts no ice with West, in her floating frothy peignoir and her plush, dim, white drawing room. She’d been expecting a man. Expecting a man is what she’s famous for.

Arbus, played by Diana Glenn, is an androgynous beatnik in scruffy black leather and jeans. She is a jarring note from the start, a scuff on the carpet, a rip in the upholstery.

‘Why all the white?’ she wants to know.

‘I just like seeing where I’ve been dirty,’ says West.

Diana Glenn as Diane Arbus in Arbus & West (photograph by Jeff Busby)

The American star of stage and screen is both a gift and a hindrance to a playwright; with her welter of famous bons mots (or ‘motts’ in West’s honking Brooklyn drawl, reprised in all its knowing swagger in a fine portrayal by Melita Jurisic), she is guaranteed all the best lines, and she delivers them with just the right timing. But she’s a caricature, a medley of swaying derriere and curling lip, hand on hip and shocking riposte. You expect a drum roll after every aphorism.

In contrast, Arbus is famous for what she captured on film, not for what she said. We know she was prone to depression, had a brilliant eye, and was attracted to freaks and misfits. She was also interested in capturing, according to her biographer Arthur Lubow, ‘those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort’. Sewell has drawn heavily on Lubow’s work, but it’s debatable whether the Arbus we see on stage was as poised or calculating in real life.

The inference that Mae West is also trapped, a central tenet of the play, is also questionable. Is her frank pursuit of erotic fulfilment a front? And is it liberating or a form of entrapment? This is one of the questions posed by Arbus, in a play that explores feminism from different ends of the spectrum.

It is intriguing, in the current climate of #MeToo, to be reminded of a woman who called all the shots and who boasted (whether true or not) a libido that could screw any man under the table. Spoiler alert: West’s conquests and unusual mementoes included casts of her lovers’ erect penises. She showed them to Arbus, a scene recreated here. Such braggadocio in a man would be offensive. But while she was no fan of what she termed ‘bra-burning’ feminists, West is still seen as a pioneer of strong womanhood and sexual liberation.

The two-day photo shoot became a time of shared confessions and camaraderie, but when West saw the published images and accompanying text, she threatened to sue the magazine.

Renée Mulder’s set and costume design faithfully and cleverly recreate many elements of these photos. Looking at them today, they seem full of life and candour, with Mae West playing up to the camera and gently mocking her overblown public image. But Arbus’s shtick was to probe beneath the image and bare what she termed ‘the flaw’.

Melita Jurisic as Mae West in Arbus & West (photograph by Jeff Busby)

This is apposite territory for Sewell, whose exploration of the American idea of itself and its fragilities include Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America and It Just Stopped. Flaws are what he’s interested in too – huge, political, and philosophical ones, and the sort that convince you, at seventy, that you are an ageless sex bomb.

Under Sarah Goode’s direction, the pace of Arbus & West is at times slow. While Jurisic’s West is compelling, Glenn’s Arbus is too diffident and mousy. A greater sense of nervous energy and vulnerability is needed as a foil to the shellacked bravado of one of the twentieth century’s great stars of stage and screen. But this is, despite these cavils, a compelling piece of theatre and a delicious if challenging three-hander for three very accomplished actors.

Arbus & West is being performed by Melbourne Theatre Company at Arts Centre Melbourne from 22 February to 30 March 2019. Performance attended: February 28.

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons.