In 1984, the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger put a wheeze to Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat: the two painters should work together and have a joint exhibition. Warhol’s reputation was fading, Basquiat’s was growing; the attention would be enormous. Anthony McCarten’s lively new play The Collaboration uses the occasion to suggest what it is to make art – and to market it. In doing so, it explores different hearts and ideas of the US. Amid the chilly critical response to the exhibition, Basquiat was called Warhol’s “mascot”.
For the second time in months, a play at the Young Vic focuses large concerns by reimagining a real-life dialogue between male Americans. In December, James Graham’s Best of Enemies evoked political decay through the sparring of William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal. McCarten’s drama is more conciliatory, but the contrasts in vision and experience it evokes are tremendous – and tremendously embodied. Jeremy Pope’s Basquiat, in a glossy rust-coloured suit, dreadlocks springing skywards, is restless, open, captivating: he moves sometimes with the twitch of a drug habit, once with the desperate energy of a man who has just seen a friend’s head smashed by cops, always with the compulsion of someone about to capture and light up on canvas an inner and outer landscape.
