Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The painter and his lover are played with real intensity by Alistair Hall and Peter Clements, in a visceral psychodrama of contained violence and sadness
The famously fraught relationship between the artist Francis Bacon and his lover-muse, George Dyer, has been much documented. So it is remarkable that this play by Alistair Hall makes the story so utterly fresh and arresting. Hall has drawn on documents and letters from the Francis Bacon estate, but if Buggers is anchored in research, it leads with physicality, charged with eroticism and contained violence.
Hall plays Bacon, and Peter Clements portrays Dyer, with absolute conviction. Clements’ performance as an initially swaggering man, who Bacon airily describes as his “delicious piece of rough trade” and who over the years succumbs to alcoholism, is especially astute and vulnerable.
The play begins in 1963 with a wordless sequence that shows their first night together, drawn somewhere between a wrestling match and an act of passion. The choreography retains its visceral threat throughout (great work by movement director Ken Nakajima). They could be Pinter’s men as they circle one another barefoot on Rosie Elnile’s set, which is somewhere between a Bohemian apartment and a wet-room, complete with toilet and tub.Beautifully directed by Alice Wordsworth, the two-hander proceeds to capture the full span of their intense, complicated love – a melange of eroticism, sadomasochistic power-play and cruelty – from this first charged night to Dyer’s death in a Paris hotel room in 1971.
