By Barry Dickens
Directed by Julian Meyrick and featuring Neil Pigot
Reviewed by Josephine Giles
Friday, 14 October, 2011
Whitely’s Incredible Blue … an hallucination is not so much a play about Brett Whitely but, appropriately, an abstract theatrical portrait of the famous artist. Whitely’s inner world is imagined through words and music as he occupies “purgatory” in the lonely country motel room where he met his death from heroin at the age of fifty-three.
Writer and Whitely biographer Barry Dickens “dreamt” the play 12 years ago when experiencing hallucinations and visions during a life-threatening bout of pneumonia. Since then the play – originally a sweeping epic written for a large cast – has been through years of development with the assistance of director Julian Meyrick. What evolved is a visually sparse, but aurally rich setting that swirls with the sounds of a freeform improvisation jazz trio and a stream of consciousness monologue from the figure of Whitely, acted with intense nervous energy by Neil Pigot.
Taped voices deliver hallucinatory stage directions (perhaps remnants of the original script): a heron ballet and other literal representations of Whitely’s visual inspirations are thankfully left to the imagination of the audience. The only visual clues to his art are a hanging white mobile, a blank sheet of paper and ultramarine blue lights, which at one stage snake across his body.
Whitely’s obsessions and madness, including his on and off again love affair with heroin, love of birds and beauty, misanthropy, disconnected relationships with muse and wife Wendy and daughter Arkie, and the insidious influence of his mother Beryl, emerge in a jumble of freefall poetry.
Accompanying musicians Robert George (drums), Robert Calvert (saxophones and whistles) and Pietro Fine (piano) improvise throughout. At times poignant or gently lyrical, then jagged and frenzied, their playing not only replicates the musical chaos in which Whitely liked to work, but are an apt metaphor for his flights of fancy, both on and off the canvass.
It matters not whether we like Brett Whitely, or even Barry Dickens for that matter. I liked the play. It imaginatively illustrates the particular loneliness of the genius artist, feted as a celebrity while struggling with a gift that he often experienced as an affliction: hell-bent on, and eventually successful in, self-destruction.
This review first appeared on AussieTheatre.com
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