The Collaboration- Young Vic

Priority booking for members today, £10 front row seats. That'll do.

Thanks londonpostie. I had this in the diary to book, but hesitated due to the current situation. But £10 front row and credit vouchers to use, and I’m there!

Front row for a tenner, nice and easy! Thought I had credit but turns out they just refunded me last year.

It’s kinda weird that the YV had two plays in a row featuring Andy Warhol as a character.

Two hours fifteen minutes including an interval according to the Young Vic website (I’m seeing it on Monday)

Deadline reported that it's going to be made into a movie with this cast and crew, and on the YV website it says they're not doing a livestream. 

I am into art, but a stage play seems like an odd medium for people who chose to express themselves visually, and in the case of Warhol made not speaking such a major part of his schtick. 

LD is lucky dip. As Dave said - when you get to the theatre you have to join a queue for the lucky dip ticket holders and then you'll be taken to wherever there is a free seat a couple of minutes before the show starts, which could be anywhere in the theatre.

That's so strange. When I booked my tickets there were three or four consecutive dates mentioning the show would be filmed on those days. I presumed it was for a livestream or something like the Old Vic: In Camera series they had during lockdown.

Maybe that has been scrapped since they're making a film?

You're right, but I'm sure it said 75 minutes (no interval) when I booked.  Did anyone else see that?  It's quite a jump.

This sounds like very typical Anthony McCarten fare then. He's made his name writing about famous men, but there's always something missing from all his work, or they are loaded with sentimentality. But impressive how he'll turn this into a film as well, while not doing much alteration in shifting from medium to medium 

It's a brave notion to centre a whole play around possibly two of the most unrelatable characters you could find and hope the audience will find something of interest in their imagined conversations. Does it work? Not really.

What the characters of Warhol and Basquiat have to say here about art is about as intellectually undemanding as much of modern art. There are no meaningful insights into life or the human condition to be found in their musings. These are not great philosophers; just people who got lucky finding a product for which there was a very lucrative market.

The play only becomes really interesting when "regular" people -- the promoter, the ex-girlfriend -- enter the stage, and their familiar behaviour is juxtaposed against the other-worldliness of the two artists.

While the play disappoints, it is saved by exceptional acting performances all round, particularly of the two leads. It is worth two hours of your time for that reason alone.

I preferred Act 1, which has more humour, to the melodrama of Act 2. Act 2 has the bigger wigs, and the leads both strip topless, having to carefully pull shirts over their heads without dislodging their wild tresses. As directed, there are hints of an unfulfilled homosexual attraction between the artists, which seemed like wishful thinking.

I could have done without the pre-show/interval dj at the side of the stage. Her anachronistic choice of funk and hip-hop inspired modern remixes, while not my thing, was not the issue; rather it was her bad segues and overlays, some of the latter being completely out-of-synch car crashes, and an excessive use of scratching. In my day, one could admire the craft of the club dj when all of this had to be achieved dexterously with vinyl decks. Nowadays, computers do much of the synchronisation of digital tracks, and there is no excuse for a bad mix.

Three stars.

Act 1: 19:38:20:27
Act 2: 20:38-21:37

[The Young Vic lists a 2-hour running time on their website, but, on the day, sends out an email claiming 2:15. As you can see, the truth is in between.]

I caught the Wednesday matinee of this. Agree with most of above about the play - which was ho-hum, but liked the central two performances a lot (really glad to have caught Jeremy Pope) and the set design. As others have said, it drove me to the Warhol diaries on Netflix. The DJ set drove Mr. F to despair but it would do.

With all the reports of wild or inconsiderate behaviour in other theatres - gotta say no problems at all at this performance (perhaps as you might expect with a mid-week matinee for a show like this.)

Just spotted on Twitter that this is moving to Broadway