‘This is not just a play, it’s an extravaganza,” says the painter Sandro Botticelli, as he swigs from a bottle of wine and addresses the audience. He might be right. Botticelli in the Fire is staged in audacious ways but it feels more like multimedia performance art with a play tucked in-between.
It features Botticelli as a rock’n’roll artist living in politically dangerous times; its mashup of historical fact and fiction revolves around the ideological clashes between liberals, elites and the masses, the latter of whom rise up in 15th-century Florence, first to dismantle the ruling class and then to mobilise in a wave of anti-liberal zealotry that leads to the persecution of “sodomites”.
Botticelli, an openly homosexual artist and spoiled “man-child” who enjoys the patronage and protection of the Medici family, finds himself caught between the moving forces of establishment power, public protest and persecution of the outsider.
The Renaissance painter, played by Dickie Beau, resembles a drunken YBA in leather jacket and torn jeans as he struts around the stage, speaking in contemporary vernacular about mobile phones and cars. Beau is convincing as the arch artist, but he is a shallow character, and the play’s central love story, between Leonardo Da Vinci and Botticelli, lacks the emotional voltage it needs. Botticelli’s sacrifice of love over art also feels unconvincing, and Leonardo (Hiran Abeysekera) seems like a minor character even when he becomes the play’s heart.
The conflations of past and present, and of art and reality, gives Jordan Tannahill’s script a veneer of playfulness, but it moves towards dark and serious parallels between Botticelli’s time and our age. Tannahill has spoken of the “queering” of history, in which omitted narratives and voices are excavated. First performed in 2016, his play seems even more relevant now in its unpicking of the complicated forces that turn “people power” into angry, intolerant populism.
That message is clear and compelling, but the drama’s many switches leave us on uncertain ground. It veers from camp humour and pastiche to sombre history, political intrigue, along with some thinly disguised lessons about the Renaissance, the Medicis (they “are bankers using the city like it’s their personal wallet”) and the rise of fanaticism.
Even so, Blanche McIntyre directs with daring, and there are some exhilarating moments, such as when the jaded goddess, Venus (Sirine Saba), speaks of the burden of her beauty while men in gold pants dance around her. A game of squash between Lorenzo de’ Medici and Botticelli is slickly choreographed to a soundtrack, and Johanna Town’s lighting drenches the stage with painterly colour. The various parts contain imagination and chutzpah but are too disparate to become an extraordinary whole.
• At Hampstead theatre, London, until 23 November.
