Whiteley’s Incredible Blue … an hallucination by Barry Dickins Oct 13, 2012 ***

 Fortyfivedownstairs – 13 to 23 October 2011
Reviewed by  Joe Calleri
Stars: ****

The word tortured often precedes the word artist. Brett Whiteley, one of Australia’s greatest painters, was a tortured individual - a self-indulgent free spirit, and heroin addict. In Barry Dickins’s Whiteley’s Incredible Blue … an hallucination, we join a shambolic Whiteley in purgatory.

Neil Piggott who poignantly channels the body and spirit of Whiteley in this short piece, often bears a strikingly uncanny physical resemblance to Whiteley, right down to Whiteley’s trademark mop of unruly blonde hair.

Piggott is joined on a cleverly lit and designed stage (Meredith Rogers and Kerry Saxby) by musicians Pietro Fine, Robert George and Robert Calvert who provide a sophisticated, jazzy, percussive soundscape to Whiteley’s sometimes rambling, and barely intelligible rantings on some of his most important art works, drugs, women, art, and artists including Van Gogh, Bacon and Pollock.  

Dickins has written a complex, often moving script, that in equal parts depicts Whiteley as a crazed, drug taking, creative genius, and then as a sensitive, lost, scared, pitiful, misunderstood soul starved for love and genuine connection with those closest to him, including his wife and daughter. These tender moments are among the highlights of a play that is rendered truly memorable by Piggot’s remarkable, chameleon-like depiction of Whiteley. 

by Joe Calleri