When the big-boobed whisky monster met the upper-class snoot

Lionel is a king of the New York art scene. An internationally renowned connoisseur, he travels the world creating and destroying fortunes. He anoints a masterpiece, here. He defenestrates a forgery, there. He visits the Californian city of Bakersfield (code in America for Nowheresville) to determine the authenticity of a Jackson Pollock bought for three bucks in a garage sale by an unemployed drunk named Maude. This is a great set-up. Power meets destitution. Sophistication frowns at simplicity. Wealth hits the dirt-heap.

It’s enormous fun, too. As the impeccably tailored Lionel walks into Maude’s cluttered hovel, he’s attacked by two ravening Alsatians. She offers him a whisky ‘to take the edge off’. ‘I’d rather keep the edge on.’ When she asks about his journey from New York she’s horrified to learn there was ‘NO FILM?!’ on the flight. ‘The foundation has its own jet,’ he purrs. The painting, which is wisely concealed from the audience, is produced for Lionel to assess and he subjects it to his ‘blink’ test, which tells him immediately that he’s looking at a Pollock knock-off. So Maude sets about changing his mind. The whisky starts to flow and the pair engage in a bruising bout of confession and self-vindication. Lionel gives Maude an action-lecture (mirroring Pollock’s action-painting technique), in which he argues rather unpersuasively that Picasso was the greatest figure in the history of art and that his eminence was eclipsed only by the arrival of Pollock.

The writer Stephen Sachs spices up the action with ingenious plot twists that keep the audience stimulated, and the outcome uncertain, but these deft tricks mask the play’s real problem: the characters don’t change. Such huge distances separate them that they can’t reach across and plant their toes on the opposite bank.