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.
