Jeremy Pope and Paul Bettany as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol
(Picture: Marc Brenner)Paul Bettany makes a triumphant return to the London stage in this account of Andy Warhol’s fraught 1984 collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat. His gorgeous performance as the etiolated peddler of silk-screen soup cans is matched by American hotshot Jeremy Pope’s expressive reading of the Haitian/Puerto Rican enfant terrible. The dense and fascinating script by Anthony McCarten, writer of biopics The Two Popes, Darkest Hour and Bohemian Rhapsody, gives them plenty of big themes – art, commerce, identity, faith, death – to chew on.
There’s a synergy here that director Kwame Kwei-Armah usefully cultivates: Bettany returning to theatre after 25 years, fourteen of them spent in Marvel’s Avengers franchise; Warhol returning to paint after 25 years of parties, gossip and lucrative printmaking; Pope, nominated for two separate Tony Awards in his first year on Broadway and catapulted to success like Basquiat. The parallels aren’t exact, but there’s both an empathy and a tension between the actors and their roles.
