Three Figures and Portrait, 1975
Francis Bacon
Tate Liverpool
Buggers, a new play tracing the volatile relationship between painter Francis Bacon and his lover and muse George Dyer, has premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, running at Pleasance Courtyard through August 30th. Written by and starring Alistair Hall as Bacon, with Peter Clements as Dyer, the production is the first to receive research access from the Estate of Francis Bacon, which allowed Hall to draw on personal documents, letters, and artifacts in developing the script.
Structured as a triptych, echoing the artwork format Bacon used throughout his career, the play unfolds across three fractured time periods, rather than following a linear timeline. It opens with the pair’s first night together in 1963, when Bacon, already an internationally acclaimed painter, became consumed by Dyer, a charismatic East End petty criminal roughly half his age. As Bacon painted him more than any other subject, Dyer grew increasingly dependent on the world of fame and excess that Bacon offered him while struggling with alcoholism and a deteriorating sense of self. The relationship, marked by sadomasochistic power dynamics and contained violence, is directed by Alice Wordsworth with movement direction by Ken Nakajima and set design by Rosie Elnile.
The play builds toward Dyer’s death in a Paris hotel room in 1971, from an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol, two days before the opening of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais. Bacon had been consumed by preparations for the show in Paris, leaving Dyer behind at the hotel. Dyer’s death, and Bacon’s guilt over it, would recur throughout the artist’s subsequent work, including in his “Black Triptychs” of the early 1970s.
In a five-star review of the production for the Guardian, critic Arifa Akbar called it a “phenomenal flesh and blood portrait,” praising Hall and Clements’s performances as charged with “real intensity” amid “a visceral psychodrama of contained violence and sadness.” She singled out the play’s wordless opening sequence and its closing device—reading aloud the titles and dates of the many paintings Francis Bacon made of Dyer—as particularly effective in conveying the emotional weight of their decade-long relationship.
Buggers runs through August 30th, with no performances on August 17th and 24th.
