'Yes, it was awful, but there was also so much love': Francis Bacon and George Dyer at the Edinburgh Fringe
A new play looks at the vibrant, chaotic and passionate relationship between two lovers. Carla Passino talks to its creator Alistair Hall.
When Francis Bacon’s grand retrospective opened at the Grand Palais, in Paris, France, on October 26, 1971, his lover George Dyer had been dead two days, lost to a lethal cocktail of drinks and pills. The artist attended the inauguration anyway, a decision that many viewed as callous and which cemented his reputation, at least among Dyer’s friends, as the blackguard in the couple’s tempestuous relationship.
‘I don’t believe he was a villain,’ counters Alistair Hall, who has written a play on Bacon and Dyer. Buggers will portray the troubled artist on stage when it premieres at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this month. ‘I think he made some bad choices. George was also very temperamental and violent. You know, he is often painted as the victim, which he was in many ways, but George was also a perpetrator a lot of the time... I would never say that either of them was a villain.’
Noting that the artist looked awful in the footage from the Grand Palais opening — ‘his lip is cut; he looks like he had been crying’ — Alistair can’t quite fathom why Bacon decided to attend, but then Buggers isn’t a play that passes judgement: ‘I wanted to present these men and their very essence.’
Alistair Hall will also star in the play as Francis Bacon.
The project is grounded in his long-standing passion for the artist’s work — ‘I feel seen by it, and I see something in it’ — but the final push came from seeing ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery: ‘I was so struck by the melancholy and the beautiful way in which that exhibition was curated and the power of his portraits [that] I thought, “I really need to make something about Dyer and Bacon.” They were together for almost a decade, so, yes, it was awful, but there was also so much love and I felt like I wanted to get into the nuance of all of that.’
Writing about Bacon, let alone playing him on stage, is a tall order: ‘He's a real contradiction of a man. I mean, we all are, as human beings — we say one thing, we mean another; we feel one thing the next minute, and we feel something else the next day — but Bacon, I feel like he's that, amplified.’
In a brave, inspired move, Alistair — who jokes that the artist, were he alive today, would find him ‘unbearable’ because he leads a quiet, wholesome life — decided to get in touch with the artist’s estate. ‘I thought I'd be in and out within 20 minutes and they'd laugh at me.’ Instead, they opened the archive to him, so he could research all the material from the Dyer years. ‘I had my last visit there two weeks ago. They've been incredible and I'm so so grateful. They've never asked to see the scripts. They've never tried to approve anything and they've been really supportive.’ Yet, the play, he is keen to add, is as much about Dyer as it is about Bacon: ‘One thing that was so important to me was to really give George a voice and some authorship of his life.’
'It becomes something very toxic and very violent and very unpredictable, and then it becomes this tragedy'
‘In the beginning, we explore the electricity and the excitement. I imagine their first morning together after the night they met. Then, we are transported to years later, when things aren't working. We all know what that feels like to fall in love, to think that this is it, to think that you found everything…To know that it starts as that, then it becomes something very toxic and very violent and very unpredictable, and then it becomes this tragedy — yes, it's been really hard [to write] and weirdly, it's taken me back to some emotional parts. I've been thinking about when I was a teenager and I'd just moved to London, and I had all these hopes and dreams, and I got waylaid with addiction, and I had all this deep sense of belonging all the time for someone to rescue me.’
He believes that something similar contributed to the implosion of the couple. ‘With Bacon and Dyer, there's so much longing in that relationship, they both expect something from each other, but the other person cannot give it and they are muddled up in addiction. Both men are alcoholics; they really enable each other, and both are screaming at each other for help or for something else. But neither is listening.’
Dyer featured in much of Bacon's work, such as in 'Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer'.
Although legend has it that the two men met when Dyer broke into the artist’s apartment, they had, far more mundanely, chanced upon each other at a pub in Soho in 1963. Art historian Michael Peppiatt reports the artist’s recollection of that first encounter in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma: ‘George was down the far end of the bar and he came over and said “You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?”’
They could hardly have come from more different worlds. ‘Bacon, when they met, had just had the Tate retrospective. He had paintings on display in New York, his profile was growing and growing,’ explains Alistair. He had also come from an affluent, prominent family in the first place. ‘He left home very young, he knew trouble, but he had safety in a way that George [didn’t]. George was from a working-class background. He was in and out of prison. He struggled with his identity, so privilege separates these two.’
Yet, they fell for each other and were much in love, at least initially, with Dyer becoming a muse to Bacon, as much as a lover — the first portraits of him date from very early in their relationship. Alistair was especially moved by their photos together: ‘Pictures of them on the Orient Express; pictures of them on holiday. That's when you think, “they were happy at times”... You really see domestic moments between these men and what I couldn't get my head round is the relaxation in each other, which is easy to forget when you know what's coming, when you know the ending.’
Rather than chronicling the unravelling of their lives, however, he imagines three moments at the outset, halfway and end of their relationship, a tripartition recalling Bacon’s triptychs (the title of the play — Buggers — is also a nod to the artist’s work: it’s the nickname by which one of his paintings, the 1953 Two Figures, became known).
'It's the human condition of belonging, feeling misunderstood, identity, class, sexuality, desire'
Yet, Buggers is not — or not only — a play about the artist and his lover (Alistair says you don’t need to be familiar with Bacon and his work to enjoy it).
He, director Alice Wordsworth and Peter Clements, who plays George, worked to strip Bacon and Dyer of their art-historical significance and present them instead as a ‘very human’ couple: ‘They could be my mum, they could be my brother, because the themes are the same in this relationship. It's the human condition of belonging, feeling misunderstood, identity, class, sexuality, desire — it’s things that aren't just exclusive to Bacon and Dyer.’
A story he shares from the earliest days of the play drives his point home: ‘Something that really struck me before I started writing [is that] I went to visit Dyer's grave. It was in the same cemetery where a dear friend of mine died by suicide 10 years ago and I thought, “These are two men, decades apart, but the struggles are the same.” The struggles are the same and I think that was my impetus.’
