Theatre review: Botticelli in the Fire

Roxana Silbert must be planning on giving her new theatre’s regulars a bit of a fright if her second main-stage show is anything to go by – you don’t know what silence sounds like until you’ve heard a Hampstead audience’s reaction to a comedy cunnilingus scene. Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli is best known for his “Birth of Venus” but his private life seems to have been full of mystery and contradictions: There are reports of him having been promiscuously gay as well as, in later life, having been a devoted follower of homophobic, fire-and-brimstone preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Both his sexuality and the extent of his religious conversion are disputed, however, and for his fictionalised biography Botticelli in the Fire Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill takes both stories to be true; in what Botticelli himself (Dickie Beau) introduces as the story of his downfall, we see what might have led him from poster child for Renaissance excess to allegedly burning many of his own paintings in the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities.

We meet Botticelli at the height of his fame, a bisexual playboy whose position as a close friend of Florence’s ruler Lorenzo de Medici (Adetomiwa Edun) means he feels he has more or less free rein to behave as he likes with no fear of repercussions.

He may be taking this too far though when Medici’s wife Clarice Orsini (Sirine Saba) poses for him; he decides to make her the model for his Venus, which means she’ll be nude, a controversial enough move even if he didn’t then go on to have an affair with her. Despite his assertion that Medici won’t mind and probably has an open relationship anyway, Botticelli knows well enough to keep the affair a secret. In fact his relationship with Clarice doesn’t seem to be about lust, on his part at least – he sees it as part of the elaborate power games he has to play to stay in favour at court, and is really more interested in his new apprentice Leonardo da Vinci (Hiran Abeysekera.) But Medici’s own power may be on the wane: The Plague is returning to Florence, and Savonarola (Howard Ward) uses the public fear about it to build followers with his sermons about how the Medicis’ debauchery has brought down divine retribution. When some of Savonarola’s more violent sentiments are made literal by his followers, his easy denial of having incited it sounds like many a 21st century commentator.

Tannahill’s play is structured like a wild party that starts to go horribly wrong: Botticelli’s bitchy back-and-forths with best friend Poggio de Chiusi (Stefan Adegbola) sets the tone for an evening of high camp in a deliberately anachronistic world where Florence doesn’t have a sewage system yet but Medici sends Botticelli texts and Clarice can’t find her car keys. As a way of underscoring the play’s warning about present-day parallels and never becoming complacent about the progress of acceptance it’s on the blunt side, but it fits in with the way Blanche McIntyre’s production throws the kitchen sink at the play, both to up its surreal entertainment quotient and to enhance its feel of a world off-balance: From the aforementioned frantic sex scene, a FULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!from Beau and Abeysekera and a brief SEVERE VADGE WARNING!from Saba, a bona fide coup de théâtre from something as simple as a trapdoor, and Saba’s Venus being wheeled on in a giant clam to lipsync to Britney Spears’ “Work, Bitch” there’s a lot going on.

Too much, inevitably, and although there’s generally something impressive going on at any given moment, the tonal shifts don’t always work and I could have done with fewer interludes early on: Beau and Abeysekera are doing strong work in the moving final scenes but the play’s run a bit too long by that point and is bordering on Multiple Ending Syndrome as a few too many earlier moments get called back to. Still, James Cotterill’s design of an imposing warehouse space is a blank canvas that can show both colourful bursts of creativity and a stark, bleak vision of the outside world that’s encroaching in – the way it suggests the bodies piling up once the plague hits town is brutal and memorable. Like Botticelli, McIntyre’s production is bursting with creativity and audacity that sometimes trips it up; also like Botticelli, once the chaos is all over it does feel like it’s left something of value behind.

Botticelli in the Fire by Jordan Tannahill is booking until the 23rd of November at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.