Andy Warhol, gentrification, and the criminal justice system are all under the microscope on the London stage this week – to varying degrees of success. Next week, we’ll be reviewing Kit Harington’s Henry V, Our Generation at the National Theatre, and After The End.
The Collaboration – Young Vic ★★★★☆
In this arty drama, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat bare their knuckles and souls over a collaboration in the artist’s studio. Paul Bettany’s entertainingly neurotic, affecting performance as Warhol is a joy, while Jeremy Pope plays Basquiat as his more cerebral, thoughtful foil: he’s got a profound faith in the power of his paintbrush, is unable to understand Warhol’s flippancy, and is endlessly eloquent even though he’s constantly half-stoned. Together, they debate the purpose of art and create tentative artworks together. The authenticity-obsessed Basquiat cajoles Warhol into picking up a paintbrush after decades of screenprinting, while Warhol persuades Basquiat to indulge his fixation with the empty visual trappings of American capitalism.
Anthony McCarten’s play is a fantastically enjoyable exercise in giving the audience what they want. It’s packed with gossipy insights – from Basquiat’s sexual relationship with Madonna to Warhol’s fight to conceal his homosexuality from journalists – and quaint moments of humour, like when Warhol is unable to resist whipping out a hoover at Basquiat’s filthy flat.
Sometimes their blossoming bond feels a little too neat and implausible: McCarten clearly loves both artists too much to shade in the darkness and narcissism that biographers have found in Warhol, or to delve too deeply into the torment in Basquiat’s psyche that led him to cover his canvases in graves and skulls. But it’s hard to mind when McCarten’s writing is so good at a punchy, well-turned aphorism. “All artists with wit should be listened to; all gloomy bastards should be clubbed to death,” proclaims Warhol at one point. And in this play, wit wins out.
The Collaboration’s story stops just before things get messy – before the pair’s canvases were panned by the critics, before Basquiat was woundingly described as Warhol’s “mascot” in the press, and before both artists’ premature deaths a couple of years later. Instead, it’s a brilliantly performed, pacy portrait of a relationship at its warmest and best: tinted in the bright, saturated hues of the canvases they shared. Alice Saville
Please Do Not Touch – Pleasance ★★★☆☆
A barren cell in a Birmingham young offenders’ institution isn’t the most expected, nor exciting of settings for a theatre performance, but it’s where Casey Bailey bases his one-man story of finding cultural pride after prejudice. Please Do Not Touch explores the ways in which morality and legality aren’t necessarily synonymous, as Mason serves several months in prison for theft. While at a National Trust house some time before, he came across a centuries-old afro comb from an African country and decided to take it from its display. After all, he thinks, what is stealing when you’re recovering items that were stolen in the first place?
As the play’s central character, Tijan Sarr gives a confident and sincere performance, delivering poetic monologues on the injustice of his situation and the struggles he faces as a young black man finding his way in places that try to stifle him. Some particularly shining moments occur when Mason embodies other characters in his life; his mum, for one, is proud of her son for standing up for what he believes in.
Though the message is well worth exploring, the play is more of an animated lecture than a compelling performance. It’s a tough task to hold down a show with just a cot, a desk and chair and a radio for company on stage, and Sarr does as much as he can to succeed. But for all its realism, showing the dull monotony of months inside in such a literal way leaves the production with limited space to grow. Nicole Vassell
Red Pitch – Bush Theatre ★★★★☆
What happens when your “ends” are no longer yours? It’s a question posed more and more as gentrification sweeps across the UK, “transforming” struggling areas and driving out long-time residents in the process. In south London, three 16-year-old boys – Omz (Francis Lovehall), Joey (Emeka Sesay) and de facto leader Bilal (Sex Education’s Kedar Williams-Stirling) – are beginning to see its harrowing effects.
As the audience files into Bush Theatre, the teenagers are already on the pitch and training hard. Football is the catalyst for the action in the first play from Tyrell Williams (best known for BBC Three mockumentary #HoodDocumentary) but you can hate the sport and love this production. Football facts and lingo are minimal and the show never feels inaccessible. At its heart, instead, is the trio’s friendship. Between them, everything is a competition. Happiness and anger are clearly linked, with celebration turning to fighting and back again in seconds, making for a clear commentary on modern masculinity.
On stage, the three leads feel totally at ease with each other. They chew on their silver chains and their hands never move from the waistband of their joggers. Under the direction of the Bush Theatre’s associate artistic director Daniel Bailey, there’s barely a moment of silence, with laugh-out-loud dialogue overlapping as each boy fights to have the last say.
When your neighbourhood is being treated with such violence, it’s no surprise that the boys turn to it, too. As they find themselves driven apart, their play-fighting becomes real and they throw each other to the floor with shocking, loud thuds. But brutality in Red Pitch, ultimately, plays a small part. It’s the joy you’ll remember. Isobel Lewis
