Review Roundup: THE COLLABORATION, Starring Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope

The world premiere of The Collaboration, Anthony McCarten's thrilling new drama directed by Young Vic Artistic Director Kwame Kwei-Armah, is now open at the Young Vic.

New York, 1984. Fifty-six-year-old Andy Warhol's star is falling. Jean-Michel Basquiat is the new wonder-kid taking the art world by storm. When Basquiat agrees to collaborate with Warhol on a new exhibition, it soon becomes the talk of the city. As everyone awaits the 'greatest exhibition in the history of modern art', the two artists embark on a shared journey, both artistic and deeply personal, that re-draws both their worlds.

Paul Bettany, multi award-winning actor (The Avengers, WandaVision, A Very British Scandal) is the iconic Warhol alongside two-time Tony Award nominee Jeremy Pope (Hollywood, Choir Boy, Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations) as the magnetic Basquiat, with the complete cast also including Sofia Barclay and Alec Newman.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

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Debbie Gilpin, BroadwayWorld: You will leave the theatre still baffled by this unlikely friendship, as well as questioning the nature of art. Hopefully, too, this play will make you realise that our differences can actually bring us together. A great snapshot of two creative masters at work.

Matt Wolf, New York Times: A figure of white-wigged insouciance still reeling from having been shot by Valerie Solanas some years before the play starts, this Warhol reveals an insecurity and disgust that take the part well beyond caricature. Survival, you sense, is no less precarious for him than it is for Basquiat. The two legends are hellbent on self-laceration, reminding us that, no matter how great our cultural legacy, we're all mortal.

David Benedict, Variety: From "The Theory of Everything" to "The Two Popes" via "The Darkest Hour" and "Bohemian Rhapsody," bio-dramas are McCarten's stock-in-trade. He and the same cast and director are already at work on a movie of "The Collaboration," in which the story might well work better: Being able to show the whole story on screen could bring this material to life.

Liam Hess, Vogue: Yes, opposites will always attract. But in The Collaboration, largely thanks to its powerful central performances, we gain an understanding of why two wildly different but equally combustive creative figures might be drawn to each other in their shared quest for a kind of immortality-and even help each other to get there. A glimpse of that is worth the entry price alone.

Nick Curtis, Evening Standard: Star casting and all, the production feels like a glitzier but richer companion to John Logan's earnest 2009 play Red, which featured Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko and covered similar territory. It's a deeply showy exploration of artifice. To quote one of Basquiat's favourite expressions: boom, for real.

Arifa Akbar, Guardian: Bettany and Pope do so much more than merely ventriloquising their celebrity parts. Bettany captures Warhol's tics - his gawkiness and gormless stares with a deadpan streak of cynicism. He is a far more rounded character than David Bowie's amusingly eccentric Warhol in Schnabel's film and steers clear of caricature but certainly brings humour. Pope, meanwhile, gives us a seductive, childlike free spirit in his Basquiat but remains - maybe deliberately - more of an enigma.

Alice Seville, Independent: Anthony McCarten's play is a fantastically enjoyable exercise in giving the audience what they want. It's packed with gossipy insights - from Basquiat's sexual relationship with Madonna to Warhol's fight to conceal his homosexuality from journalists - and quaint moments of humour, like when Warhol is unable to resist whipping out a hoover at Basquiat's filthy flat. And Young Vic artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah's production is just as crowd-pleasing.

Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail: Kwame Kwei-Armah's hypnotic production, set in the artists' paint-spattered studios with projected views of Manhattan, is never maudlin or pious. It fizzes instead, thanks to Basquiat playing Miles Davis jazz trumpet on a tape, and it rocks awesomely thanks to a DJ on a balcony spinning 1980s club anthems including MARRS and Grace Jones.

Sam Marlowe, iNews: It was billed as a prize-fight between two cultural heavyweights, in one corner the international Pop Art icon and celebrity darling Andy Warhol, in the other Jean-Michel Basquiat, the hot young talent who began his career painting on the New York streets. Both sported boxing gloves in the poster that advertised a 1984 exhibition of works they made together. This new biodrama by Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything, Bohemian Rhapsody) imagines a collaborative process that sees them creatively sparring and emotionally slugging it out.

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out London: No getting away from it, 'The Collaboration' is fanfic. It's a witty, stirring and slightly cringey drama in which playwright and two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter Antony McCarten imagines all the cool and profound things that Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat said to each other when they collaborated IRL together during the '80s. Which is fair enough: it's a play *about* Warhol and Basquiat that uses the fact of their time together as a pretext to explore each man's undoubtedly fascinating soul. The trouble is, they're both so massively iconic as pop-cultural figures that it's difficult to write them as serious characters without it seeming rather gauche, no matter how smart the dialogue. But as sheer entertainment, Kwame Kwei-Armah's production goes all out, from Anna Fleischle's cool loft-apartment sets and Duncan McLean's evocative projections, to a banging soundtrack that runs from Bronski Beat to Miles Davis and actual live DJing from Xana.

Franco Milazzo, Londonist: The two central characters are brought vividly to life principally through Young Vic AD Kwame Kwei-Armah's electric direction; the interchanges between the young mixed-race livewire and the languid albino-like 50-something are often utterly mesmerising. Alex Newman gamely plays the duo's agent Bruno but Sofia Barclay's part as Basquiat's ex is underwritten almost to the point of obsolescence. This play will likely work better as a film, and you can't ignore the awkwardness of some of the writing. Foibles aside, it'd easily be a five-star show; there is no denying the powerful performances and how they light up the stage over the barely-noticeable two-hour-plus running time.

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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