Pip Utton as Francis Bacon is combing his hair while bathed in red light.
A bottle of champagne is within reach, hair swept back, leather jacket and polo neck in place, the award-winning actor appears less like a performer than a man who has wandered in from 1950s Soho and brought the Colony Room with him. He will later ask one member of the audience to unwrap the champagne’s foil and another to pop the cork.
This is Utton’s final Fringe, and there is something fitting about his choice of Bacon, another outsider who lived by his own rules. Margaret Thatcher once dismissed him as “that awful artist”, and Utton brings us Bacon in all his tragic, contradictory glory, recalling his “gilded gutter life”.
The atmosphere is thick with cigarette smoke that exists more in the imagination than on stage. You can almost feel the sticky carpet of the Colony Room, where Muriel Belcher presides over a world of aristocrats, actors, writers, criminals, professional boozers and general drunks. The verbal abuse between Belcher and Bacon passes for affectionate banter, with insults forming their own language.
There is plenty of laughter; a telephone becomes a recurring device, and Bacon answers it with an expletive. When the caller rings back, we discover it is Melvyn Bragg, making his celebrated South Bank Show documentary. Utton finds the humour in Bacon’s outrageousness, but the laughter gradually takes us somewhere darker. Bacon’s personal life is dramatic, violent and often destructive. He is drawn towards dangerous men and toxic relationships, while the show explores his difficult childhood, his bullying father and the strange hold that family history continues to exert over his life. One particularly violent beating is deeply disturbing, and it seems to play out again and again by choice.
Bacon speaks about art critics with rage and has little time for pomp or artistic reverence. His Popes are discussed, paintings are destroyed, and he seems almost dismissive of the work that makes him famous. Like David Bowie, he appears determined to remain on the outside, especially when the establishment comes calling.
There is also something fascinating about the contradiction between the mythology and the man. This celebrated painter lives in a small London flat with his nanny, with a studio room where he paints and creates. He is attracted to the underworld and the dangerous characters around Soho, with figures such as the Krays forming part of the wider world he inhabited.
Utton does not simply imitate Bacon; he inhabits him. The voice, the physicality, the sudden shifts between charm, cruelty and vulnerability make it possible to imagine that we have stepped inside the Colony Room and encountered the painter himself. Bacon lived to 82 despite years of excess. His death in 1992 casts another shadow across the performance, particularly as the man who has spent an hour filling the room with noise and bravado gradually reveals his loneliness. At the end, there is no grand farewell. Just a simple “cheerio”. After all the laughter, cruelty, champagne and chaos, it feels as though Bacon is speaking from the grave before disappearing into the darkness. After the applause, Utton returns for one final goodbye. For a moment the character falls away, and we are reminded that this is also his farewell to the Fringe. It is a quietly affecting final gesture, bringing the two departures together.
Pip Utton’s Farewell to Edinburgh Fringe: Bacon, The Green, Pleasance Courtyard, Until 29 August, 12.15 pm
