Botticelli In The Fire review: Restless and indulgent but never boring

1/9
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis25 October 2019

Roxana Silbert is making her mark as artistic director of Hampstead Theatre, one way or another. The first production she programmed met with poor reviews and controversy over casting.

Her second on the main stage is this playfully serious mash-up of Renaissance politics and pansexual modern hedonism, an example of what its ­Canadian writer Jordan Tannahill refers to as “queering history”. It’s exuberant fun with a sober central point but, like its protagonist, rather too in love with its own sass, swagger and cleverness.

In Tannahill’s imagining, Medici-­controlled 15th-century Florence is a place of smartphone-toting excess. The bitchery and debauchery of brilliant, sexually insatiable Sandro Botticelli and his gay fellow artists would make RuPaul blush. Meanwhile, plague and starvation drive the poor towards the fiery populism of puritan monk Savonarola.

It’s not an exact parallel of our age, more an analogy for tipping points where hurtling progressivism or galloping inequality result in a backlash.

The story is prosaic. Botticelli has an affair with his patron’s wife while painting her as The Birth Of Venus. His ultimate punishment is to choose between his art and his beautiful assistant, Leonardo da Vinci. But Tannahill allows himself many indulgences. Venus confesses dark desires in a Britney-soundtracked vogueing routine. Conversely, a scene where Botticelli’s mother bathes him, like Mary washing Christ, is poignant.

Blanche McIntyre’s production has a looseness suited to the material, allowing Dickie Beau’s cocksure Botticelli to show and tell us what an awful person he is. James Cotterill’s black box set becomes an artist’s studio, a squash court, and a dramatic bonfire for anything Savonarola considers decadent.

This production is never boring but it is restless and profligate with audience attention. You sometimes wish Tannahill, who is 31 and works across many art forms, would settle down and tell you what he means. You also boggle at what Silbert might serve up next.

Until November 23 (020 7722 9301, hampsteadtheatre.com)

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