Theatre review: The Collaboration

Andy Warhol made a couple of cameo appearances in the Young Vic's last production, Best of Enemies; for Anthony McCarten's The Collaboration he takes centre stage. But where the 1960s Warhol we saw last year was at the height of both his creativity and his celebrity, the 1984 Warhol (Paul Bettany) we meet now is all too aware that - while still a big name - his work has become predictable, his prices are falling, and the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeremy Pope) are the names on everyone's lips now: Warhol still hangs out with Yoko Ono, but Basquiat gets photographed with (and may or may not be sleeping with) Madonna. The two wildly different artists do share an agent, Bruno (Alec Newman,) and he sees the idea of an unlikely collaboration between the two as a way both of propelling his up-and-coming client even further, and of revitalising the established one's flagging creativity.

McCarten contrives a somewhat simpler origin story for what was by all accounts a much longer and more complex friendship: The clinical, logo-fixated Warhol who hasn't painted by hand in decades, and the passionate Basquiat who uses painting to release his personal demons see no link between their work, and take a lot of persuading to meet up.

Apart from a few framing moments each act of the play is essentially one long scene, the first seeing their first attempt to work together and the second jumping forward three years when, having enough work completed to fill an exhibition, they collaborate on the final canvas. It also splits the attention between its leads - in the first act, Bettany holds sway as he gets to tap into all of Warhol's tics, eccentricities and affectations as the older artist dips into the neuroses that have restricted him to observing and documenting the world with screen-print and video rather than traditional art, having seen everyone close to him either kill themselves or try to kill him. Though charismatic and fiery, Basquiat is largely a sounding board.

Pope gets his chance to shine in the second act: By 1987 Basquiat had already Westbrooked his septum with cocaine and moved on to the heroin that would kill him soon afterwards, so while still a creative powerhouse he's a much more chaotic one. Add to this his just having witnessed a friend being beaten to death by police for graffitiing and it makes for an explosive finale to the men's creative collaboration.

Kwame Kwei-Armah's production hinges on the memorable central performances, which get occasional comic support from Newman, while Sofia Barclay, as Basquiat's on-off girlfriend, is tasked with getting Warhol up to speed on just how far his friend's addictions, paranoia and reckless behaviour have gone. Anna Fleischle's design will inevitably have a lot of attention on it with two visual artists at the heart of the story, and she mixes Warhol's order and Basquiat's chaos by using white rooms and vast windows, but filling them with dirt and spilt paint, while Duncan McLean's projections give us the New York locations and glimpses of the finished artworks.

But while there's a lot that's interesting going on, it's hard to narrow down what McCarten is trying to say with the play: As Warhol explains his logo-based art as a commentary on big corporations taking over the world, and Basquiat's painting starts to seem more like a kind of religious frenzy, there are times when it feels like he's dramatised their Wikipedia pages. The Collaboration invites inevitable comparisons to Red, and I personally didn't feel it got me into artists' hearts and heads as successfully. Perhaps the ultimate point is that Warhol's more cynical view of the commercialisation and commoditisation of art making it indistinguishable from business is the one that proved prophetic: Their exhibition was critically panned but in the play's coda we hear one of the paintings selling for $98 million.

The Collaboration by Anthony McCarten is booking until the 2nd of April at the Young Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.