Standing in the queue at the Pleasant Courtyard, a woman makes a wry comment to her friend, “are we seeing a very unpleasant show about a very unpleasant man?”
As a most original and influential artist, Francis Bacon (1909-1992), is renowned for grotesque figures, contorted self-portraits and wailing Popes with raw emotional intensity. His hedonistic, homosexual lifestyle revolved around hard drinking, gambling and voracious promiscuity.
In order to understand this creative maverick, Pip Utton presents a most honest and incisive dramatic portrait of Bacon through a lifetime of memories and anecdotes to reveal the private man behind his subversive art.
In black trousers and leather coat, Utton sits on a stool filing his nails, checks his makeup (dipping the powder brush in a flute of champagne, painterly-style); a telephone and another bottle of bubbly are on the table, as soft, sultry jazz plays on the soundtrack.
Bacon speaks with a slow drawl and camp RP accent, explaining that he is trying to remake himself and remain youthful - “I am a work of art.” When the phone rings (Melvyn Bragg to discuss a TV interview), he says that he is with a few friends and throughout the show he chats away as if we are guests at a cocktail party. “Cherio!” as he sips his third glass of fizz.
Through a richly coloured tapestry of tales, we learn about an unhappy childhood on his parents’ farm in Ireland, beaten by his father with a horsewhip, before being banished to stay with an uncle in Berlin where life was indeed an exotic cabaret. He shares his love of Paris and lusting after men when ‘homosexuality was illegal and exciting’. Moving to London, he frequents Muriel’s bars, clubs and the Colony Room to meet and mingle with aristocrats, diplomats and criminals. ‘Oh dear,’ he sighs with a world weariness, “such a life.”
Francis Bacon is depicted here as a born socialite - erudite, charming, sardonic, witty and self-deprecating (‘my pudding face’), with a fine talent to amuse. He describes his passion for painting from dawn to midnight: ‘Art is shock - I paint life’ and gleefully dismisses realism and Rothko abstraction. Another bottle is opened, ‘Cherio!’ and as his words start to slur, he staggers off the stool and becomes morose and maudlin, recalling love affairs and violent relationships.
‘Do you think I shall now explain what my art means?’, he asks. No, he will not. It is for us to make the connection between his disturbing experiences of physical abuse, personal demons and aesthetic obsessions and his bold, brash paintings of deformed, fleshy figures which evoke an eternal scream or a cry of fear.
This is far from an ‘unpleasant show about an unpleasant man.’ Pip Utton is a master of the monodrama with award winning success for such character performances as Chaplin, Churchill, Einstein and Hitler.
'Bacon' is a blistering, stark and intimate portrayal, getting under his skin and into his darkest soul to reveal the hidden truth, the agony and the ecstasy of his extraordinary, flamboyant and inspirational artistic life.
Show times:
Friday 6 – Friday 13 August @ 16.45
Monday 9 and Tuesday 10, additional performances @ 20.45.
Ticket prices, £10 - £12 (concession, £10/8).