Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Paul Bettany’s Warhol is a tour de force: The Collaboration, at the Young Vic, reviewed

Plus: an early Mamet play at Southwark Playhouse that's like a reheated version of Oleanna

Jeremy Pope as sulky, self-destructive Basquiat and Paul Bettany as the witty charlatan Warhol in The Collaboration. Image: Marc Brenner
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  • The Collaboration

    Young Vic, until 2 April

  • The Woods

    Southwark Playhouse, until 26 March

The Collaboration is set in the 1980s when Andy Warhol teamed up with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat to create bad art and flog it to idiots. The play unfolds like a documentary and we meet the real-life Warhol. In interviews he rarely said more than ‘yeah’, or ‘cool’, and he explains that this taciturn style was a defence mechanism developed in his youth to protect him from homophobic bullies who found his camp voice offensive.

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