Buggers review – phenomenal flesh and blood portrait of Francis Bacon and George Dyer

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The famously fraught relationship between the artist Francis Bacon and his lover-muse, George Dyer, has been much documented. So it is remarkable that this play by Alistair Hall makes the story so utterly fresh and arresting. Hall has drawn on documents and letters from the Francis Bacon estate, but if Buggers is anchored in research, it leads with physicality, charged with eroticism and contained violence.

Hall plays Bacon, and Peter Clements portrays Dyer, with absolute conviction. Clements’ performance as an initially swaggering man, who Bacon airily describes as his “delicious piece of rough trade” and who over the years succumbs to alcoholism, is especially astute and vulnerable.

Peter Clements as George Dyer and Alistair Hall as Francis Bacon in Buggers

The play begins in 1963 with a wordless sequence that shows their first night together, drawn somewhere between a wrestling match and an act of passion. The choreography retains its visceral threat throughout (great work by movement director Ken Nakajima). They could be Pinter’s men as they circle one another barefoot on Rosie Elnile’s set, which is somewhere between a Bohemian apartment and a wet-room, complete with toilet and tub.

Beautifully directed by Alice Wordsworth, the two-hander proceeds to capture the full span of their intense, complicated love – a melange of eroticism, sadomasochistic power-play and cruelty – from this first charged night to Dyer’s death in a Paris hotel room in 1971.

The relationship is initially filled with testy chemistry – and testosterone – but becomes darker. “I’m so bored,” says Bacon to Dyer. “I feel lonely when I’m with you,” Dyer responds. Scenes switch time frames and the play seems to lose its conventional shape, descending into fragments that capture emotional tumult and grief. At points it becomes a little opaque, veering into hallucination or memory, with flashes of light and shadow-play conveying mood over anything more concrete.

But the piece hypnotises even in its more abstract moments. Bacon painted Dyer numerous times over his lifetime, the titles and dates of which works are read out at the end, bringing an almost suffocating sense of sadness: for all Bacon’s cruel words, his canvases spoke his love. Wonderful writing, phenomenal performances. A small but perfect festival gem.