The Focus Theatre, Dublin

In Francis Bacon’s self-portraits, the artist’s reassuringly pudgy face is kneaded, lacerated or partly erased into a disturbing mask.

The 20th century painter of cruelty doesn’t offer himself up readily.

In Brian McAvera’s new play for Focus Theatre, though, Bacon seems dispiritingly straightforward: a camp jester and homosexual masochist who flung the mangled shape of his age onto the canvas. It’s a portrait of the artist as a solved puzzle.

McAvera, an art historian, critic and playwright, has previously given us

Picasso’s Women

, a collection of the painter’s ill-treated muses, but here he lets Bacon speak for himself, divided into two personae. There’s the flagellating hedonist we know (Cathal Quinn), and a dominatrix alter-ego, Frances (Tara Breathnach). What ought to be a lively extrapolation quickly becomes a dead end: Breathnach puts a lot of life into her performance, forever swooshing her cane across Quinn’s backside, but the character is really a submissive cipher, prompting Francis’s life story. They even share the same leopard-print lingerie.

Instead of a plot, then, we get a catalogue: the erotic, religious associations Bacon forged with images of suffering in the Blitz, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Algeria; his brutal father and destructive but inspiring sexual relationships; even some mention of the paintings.

As a play, it’s thoroughly researched and chronologically exhaustive, as though McAvera couldn’t bear to throw any detail away, but it’s never illuminating. Had Bacon faced off on stage with George Dyer, the man he most completely destroyed, we’d get the visceral shudder of his life and work. Here, he’s just talking to himself from beyond the grave, so little impels the narrative.

As director, McAvera tries to enliven proceedings with the forced jollity of the music-hall double act, endless artistic “propositions” and a busy sound design bafflingly reliant on classic TV theme tunes. (We know Bacon admired Eisenstein and Buñuel films, but was he really a

Rawhide

fan?). The consequence is that the form and aesthetic of the performance seems rootless, while Bacon himself is psychoanalysed and parsed to within an inch of his easel. That approach is inevitably reductive, as though Bacon has not been reflected in theatrical portraiture, but painted into a corner.

Runs until June 25