Soho bad boys, yet this pair are fine and dandy
Willie and Sebastian (Gilded Balloon) Poisonous wit ★★★★✩
THIS is Rab C Nesbitt creator ian Pattison’s second outing at the Fringe following i, Tommy, his bio-pic of political firebrand Tommy Sheridan. it’s a form of theatre he is obviously attracted to. As well as Sheridan, Pattison also tackled Glasgow-born radical psychiatrist RD Laing in Divided.
Here he divides his attention to delve into the lives of another two mavericks, ( or dysfunctional misfits, according to your point of view), journalist, writer, and theatre producer Willie Donaldson and artist Sebastian Horsley.
Close friends, they were the epitome of that breed of Soho bad boys that began to flourish in the 1950s and 1960s whose morals were never in question. They had none and they didn’t care who knew it. in fact, that was part of the fun.
Horsley was a self- styled dandy and posturing peacock who dressed like Jack Wild’s Artful Dodger and once had himself crucified in the Philippines. Donaldson, who wrote the bestselling Henry Root Letters and produced Beyond The Fringe, took up smoking crack in his sixties and was found dead slumped before his computer watching lesbian wrestling. A couple of dissolute conundrums wrapped in an enigma, then, who both squandered a fortune, (Donaldson lost three) and shared a fondness for drugs and prostitutes. Pattison attempts to get at the nub of their philosophy of libertine excess and dysfunctional family life by employing a comic romp revolving around their savage spat over Donaldson’s lover Rachel, who leaves him for Horsley.
The result is Withnail and Withnail. Or George and Martha without the fictional son to bicker over.
SET in Willie’s ramshackle mess of a flat, Andy Gray, in his underpants, captures the sweaty desperation of Donaldson’s roué life, and his contempt for all and sundry well into his old age, even if at times he plays it for laughs when the laugh is already there.
Stott, fingernails painted pink and in frock coat and top hat, exudes a convincing indifference to convention.
But the Wildean exchanges, cannibalistic quips and epigrams come thick and fast, as do the profanities (this is as far removed from Gray and Stott in panto as you can get), and Pattison clearly has a penchant for erring on the side of the devils rather than the angels, even if at times the play feels more like a pen portrait of the pair – al beit one dipped in poisonous wit.
Gilded Balloon until August 31