A turquoise phone rings, as jazz music plays in the background.
It’s Melvyn Bragg on the other end, a mighty wind blows through the Pleasance Courtyard as a flight passes overhead. “I can’t hear you Melvyn” says Bacon, in a moment of comical improvisation.
Having played Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplain and Albert Einstein, Pip Utton is the master of taking on and inhabiting his character utterly. This is the closest thing many of us will get to being in the company of Francis Bacon for an hour watching him heartily quaff Veuve Clicquot while telling stories that often shock, disrupt or entertain.
While putting on his make-up, Bacon informs us “Je me fais jeune” (I make myself young), this was a trick remarked upon by one BBC journalist who couldn’t believe he was talking to an 80-year-old man at the time. We are soon party to a hedonistic life spent in places such as The Colony Rooms, a drinking club in Soho and the space where he would booze into the early hours and hold court with owner Muriel Belcher.
The pair would enjoy savage banter not for the faint hearted. While Bacon enjoyed an endless spring of free champagne, the deal was he would bring other wealthy and famous patrons to the club.
Never one to explain his work, a distain for those who do is covered here “the artist’s job is to deepen the mystery”. The smell of blood and death is never far away when discussing his violent art and life, man being pummelled like butcher meat until the human form is distorted, tormented and in agony is the prevalent image and feeling. His belief that great art comes from suffering was viscerally apparent in the life he lived and those around him.
(This is the second review of the same Fringe show – two of our reviewers chose to go and see it and – independently have both awarded it five stars. You can also read Lee Levitt’s review here.)
