Are all historical events meant to be witnessed, and /or is ‘witnessing’ essential to making ‘events’ historical? August 17th Day Six in Edinburgh Highlights: 1. Buggers, a play exploring the relationship of Francis Bacon and George Dyer (The Fringe Festival); 2. Traverse Theatre Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library (the Fringe) & Lyceum Theatre Hang Time by Zora Howard & Flea Theater USA (Mainstream Festival).
Tbe painting Two Figures above was owned by Lucian Freud and gifted to him by the artist and publically described as a painting from studies of dynamic animal motion by Muybrudge, here of male wrestlers. However, Freud knew the painting as Buggers, which some find overly interpretive and others crudely but accurately literal. The painting was meant for Peter Lacey, Bacon’s first known lover and a violent and abusive airman, who threw Bacon from an upstairs window when they lived together. But the painting is also a kind of ‘witness’ to an event, in itself ambiguous, to say the least, between many possible forms of activity between naked male bodies. This is a feature of foreground an background. Though suggestive of a bed, the raised covered podium is back-grounded with folded curtains reminiscent of theatre, the space above the figures and their activity space, apparently composed of a representation of a hanging curtain, hanging vertically and figured only by supposed folds, whilst the space below all of that my be a representation of a lateral or angled space where the cover may represent a folded arena, perhaps covered with cloth, but again teased into a nearly three-dimensional appearance. Is this a staging in public of a public or ‘private’ act, whether of wrestling (even perhaps of Jacob with an Angel at the mythical, symbolic or allegoric level) or of unspecified but quite distinct men, or yet again of an act prior to or even in the process of an act of anal sex, which we consider private,
Even more complicating is the presence of lines indicating the margins of a three-dimensional cube which perhaps ‘contains’ the action of the men, or as a showcase, a vitrine such as is used in art galleries with sculpture perhaps, or limits the space of action in another sense in which living beings are contained, imprisoned and settled into manageable form, action or expression. And the painting declares its own materiality at the same time, as we see the way the media used to paint runs vertically, smudges, marks or obscures what we imagine as clearer beneath or before (time and space being themselves ambiguous) that free movement of something liquid rather than solid.
The play Buggers, as performed by Peter Clements as Dyer (top) and Alistair Hall as Bacon (bottom – the male queer joke adds ambiguity to the reference to spatial position alone) clearly references the painting, even its preliminary nature, as in the photograph below from Murdo MacLeod of The Guardian. It also shows the plasticated covering of the mattreess type stage cover on which the action takes place
We don’t start here for this ‘hold’ (another kind of containment though with an edge of the possibility of the tender) is preceded by a balletic dance mimicking wrestling with its play between varying distances and proximity between body parts common to wrestling, love gestures and sex. As they stand in this picture we can see the lit back flats on the stage with its high shelf that can become, as well as a shelf in the room, the top of a public ‘bar’ on which drinks are stood, or the upper shelving of a flat space urinal against which men stand, and whereat the play has the men meet with that stereotyped glance at each other’s sexual equipment common to how ‘cottaging‘ was (and perhaps still is)( performed in semi-public privacy.
Between a wrestling match and an act of passion … Peter Clements as Dyer and Alistair Hall as Bacon in Buggers. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/the Guardian
In telling of the meeting of Dyer and bacon some narrators speak of a probably mythical meeting where Dyer is caught in the act of burgling Bacon’s home and then persuaded, as an alternative to calling the police, to stay to have rough sex, which Bacon famously liked, with the painter. The story as to,ld in the play seems more probable though we are told that Dyer made efforts to meet Bacon, by that time a famed socialite if often in ‘low company’ like Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV .
The stage in The Pleasance Upstairs theatre (with only three rows of audience (of about 86 I believe) around the three sides of a square space had as well as padded floors, two sided vitrine structures in clear perspex at each end of front-stage, a galvanized steel bath tub containing various bowls of cloudy liquid to represent variously pre-mixed alcoholic drink, drunk liberally, used ato wash (or bathe in once the tub was cleared of bowls, or splashed against the vitrine walls as if paint by both men, or even to squah Bacon’s face against so that he looked momentarily like the distorted face portraits he made of others, especially Dyer. There was also a white porcelain toilet stage left used for various purposes but predictably as the death space for Dyer, inhabited by him as a ghost well after his death, for Bacon often returned to the hotel room where it was in Paris. The scenes of the triptych below, even the advent of the black bat were enacted and described over them with language in the play.
Arifa Akbar perfectly describes the play in The Guardian to the accompaniment of McLeod’s photographs, saying:
The relationship is initially filled with testy chemistry – and testosterone – but becomes darker. “I’m so bored,” says Bacon to Dyer. “I feel lonely when I’m with you,” Dyer responds. Scenes switch time frames and the play seems to lose its conventional shape, descending into fragments that capture emotional tumult and grief. At points it becomes a little opaque, veering into hallucination or memory, with flashes of light and shadow-play conveying mood over anything more concrete.
But the piece hypnotises even in its more abstract moments. Bacon painted Dyer numerous times over his lifetime, the titles and dates of which works are read out at the end, bringing an almost suffocating sense of sadness: for all Bacon’s cruel words, his canvases spoke his love. Wonderful writing, phenomenal performances. A small but perfect festival gem. [1]
With this I agree but with more willingness to accept the necessity of opacity, blended with an obsession for contradictory transparency, as true to Bacon’s painting but also to the surreal capture of the motion in space that is time – the haunting strobe effects and use of stills or pauses. To me it was ‘perfect’.For we could say we seeing factual history in this play but history that was only partially opened to sight, and then to privileged witnesses. One story often told of Bacon is him pouring champagne over the head of his queer artist ‘friend; (though the event queers the word) John Minton (not in this play mind) and saying @Champagne for my real friends, Real pain for my Sham friends’. Sham and real pain are hare to tell apart in art, even perhaps more so than the false and true in friendships but the issue remains that Bacon constantly played art-games with the sham and real, pain and what could also be construed as pleasure and joy. This play has all of that.
Moving away from that Theatre Geoff and I talked about how stunned we were by that play to our next event at The Traverse Theatre Studio for the Richard Jordan Productions / Luna Stage direction of Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wander the Perussian State Library, a play based and giving witness to a true fact from history, the internment and interrogation of Hannah Stern, but known to philosophy, literature and history as Hannah Arendt, her pre-marital name. I tried hard to like what seemed a very cerebral play before I realised that it seemed ‘cerebral’ only because so underwhelmingly performed and directed. Perhaps then the less said the better. Imagine being put in a prison cell at a time when Jews were already disappearing from public life, and even visibility and imagine the urge to freedom and the pull to stability. These are not only cerebral problems, perhaps not cerebral much at all. It is an index of the poverty of this play that seemed so much longer than its short duration. So let’s move on but leave a picture of the stage publicity and text, which I could not read though bought the day before.
We mooched, Geoff talking me out of the depressed state the follows an event in art to which I could not relate until our next event.That all continued at a Thai restaurant across from the Lyceum Theatre. Butafter all that reflection, it is clear, isn’t it, that even though an event occurred with little visible consequence, except that Arendt successfully escaped Nazi Germany and almost certain death in the Holocaust, the role of art is more than revisiting in public such semi-private events as secret interrogation by a paralegal government like that of Germany at the time, it must in some ways help s to weigh the significance of those events cerebrally, emotionally and as a call to some kind of empathetic action. This I expected from Hang Time, one of the star theatrical international experiences in the mainstream festival at the Lyceum Theatre. See below the wondrous cast: Kamal Bolden, Bryce Foley and Julian Rozzell.
It was clear from the start that this play would evoke contextual information through the senses, for the theatre was full, like ‘the isle’, of noises: bullfrog and cicada music, and sounds of strain of materials and, in part, resembling the creak of strained and weighted rope, perhaps blown in the wind. But, as ius quite unusual in this theatre, visual access to the scene and characters was denied by the conventional red satin curtain, so much out of sync with those noises.
When the curtain lifted we see the the three men hanged, and hanging as if dead from imagined rope so that our vision of it was imagined only from how the three men held their neck loose and lolled their heads and the felt weight of their bodies dangling beneath them, their feet visibly above and unsupported by any solid platform. There was such a platform – a tall black plinth upon which the men’s feet were allowed to stand for sone of part of their performance as these dead men lived again in talk with each other as if they were men, known to each other, ‘hanging together’ as men in life do, with chatter characteristic of each man.
Theae men are,first, Slim, the fatter young man, with much bombastic talk about his liking, flair with, prowess and penis length with women, Second is the older Bird, whose naming story is continually promised and denied but whose earnest religion and deep communal warmth is clear. Third, there is a young man so keen, after a life spent in care for others, to do something for himself, even at the expense of abandoning a girl who has is just about to bear him a baby.
But none of that is clear at the opening period that seems longer than we can bear, seeing the dead men hang and swing with those continuing sounds mentioned earlier and nought else. The duration of this is viscerally painful, so that hearing them ‘live’ again, if that is what it is, is a real relief, as much as seeing their dangling feet touch ground.
After the final lights out we see how they were suspending, on vertical weight-bearing poles with a small projected seat, all that silvered, over which their legs straddled. It must have been excruciatingly uncomfortable for the actors. Their take on tne life was often racous (especially in the crowns of Slim) but somet6serious and oft, lyrical from Bird and the youn man who, after night scenes in which they struggled and squirmed as in death throes, they all woke and the young man to ‘a pretty day’.
The writer and the directors have mich to tell us about the horror of the lynching once in the American South, but also of their possible Renaissance in suspicious cases of supposed ‘suicide’, but this is cerebral and secondary, though necessary. As an audience it is deeply uncomfortable to see made public and visible scenes we think of as full of private pain and kept relatively invisible, so sure are we tbat white violence was only a matter for extremists or those caught up in it momentarily.
But lyncings in the southern States were as oft public spectacles attended by white families including women and children, as tbe famous still from the lynching of Thomas Shipp in Indiana shows (see below).
History keeps that fact still as invisible as it can, that thieze events were conceived of as pleasurable outings, whatever any indidual nuance. Anyway, what use is nuance here? And recent far-right actions make me believe all this can happen again and not just in the USA and be presented not just as acceptable but righteous white behaviour and hustified self-defence.
However, tbis is art and great art makes ‘darkness visible’, and shows you, beyond Milton, that you do not need to go to Heel to see true darkness made visible. And yet there are forces in himan reason and’tazte’ that ask us to invisible these very facts.
But we do so at the danger of them being denied as facts at all. Which they still are!
Of course it matters in the USA. But believe me, it matters here too. If you don’t believe that, none of us may have much hope.
Bye for now
With love,
Steven xxxxxxx
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[1] Arifa Akbar (2026) ‘Buggers review – phenomenal flesh and blood portrait of Francis Bacon and George Dyer’ in The Guardian (Wed 12 Aug 2026 15.43 BST Last modified on Wed 12 Aug 2026 19.57 BST) available at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/aug/12/buggers-review-francis-bacon-and-george-dyer-pleasance-edinburgh
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