The Young Vic | ★★★★✩

The long body of Paul Bettany has shed the purple skin of his Marvel alter ego Vision for grey jeans, tight, black polar neck and a platinum blonde wig.
This is the second time in consecutive productions that Andy Warhol has appeared on the Young Vic’s stage. The artist made a brief appearance in James Graham’s Best of Enemies about how American TV got wise to making ratings out of politics (by watching civilised politicos such as Gore Vidal and William Buckley eloquently insult each other).
That cameo depicted the king of modern art as nothing more than a mute presence hovering with his buzzing cine camera like an annoying bluebottle. It was a deliberately dismissive portrayal that Anthony McCarten’s play goes a long way to compensate for.
The setting is 1984 New York, the year Warhol’s Swiss artist agent Bruno Bischofberger (Alec Newman) got the bright idea of pairing his most famous client with his fastest rising star ,Jean-Michel Basquiat, played here by Broadway’s Jeremy Pope.
Bischofberger’s plan makes more sense financially than it does artistically. Warhol’s reputation is on the wane while Basquiat’s is on the rise. A joint exhibition can only increase the value of their art.
This suits Warhol. The soup can and Marilyn screen prints on the walls of his studio are all about art’s commodification, after all.
Bischofberger wants to market the collaboration as a boxing match between two of the art world’s heavyweights, and produces a poster with the unlikely collaborators wearing boxing gloves.
It’s Warhol, the art scene phenomenon versus Basquiat who rose from the street as a graffiti artist. One hectic and impulsive, the other ordered and considered.
Physically and creatively the two artists could not be more different and Kwame Kwei-Armagh’s sure-footed production milks its tension — and mostly sustains it — from this clash of contrasting styles and world views.
It will be interesting to see how or if the planned film version breaks away from Warhol’s studio and Basquait’s grubby aprtment, the play’s two locations, conveyed here by designer Anna Fleische with a combination of arty interiors and projections of New York exteriors.
The charisma of the two men are terrifically evoked even where the dialogue of artists is saddled with artifice.
“Who are are your influences?” asks Warhol and“Where did you get the idea for the soup cans?” asks Basquait, like a pair of arts journalists handily allowing McCarten his exposition.
But then these artists probably did talk about art, until the chaos of Basquiat’s life and drug addiction (he died of a heroin overdose three years after the play is set) overwhelms them both as it does here.
Bettany’s Warhol is a still reed of a man: honest, witty, and arch. Pope’s mercurial Basquiat is jumpier, jazzier but no less insecure.
And for all the agent’s talk of boxing match, it is not the conflict that matters here, but the quietly moving coming together of two artistic spirits.