Whiteley’s Incredible Blue

Review by Alison Croggon for Theatre Notes on 14 October. See here in it’s full context.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly

Hence no more B-J in his product.

So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.

– Ezra Pound, Cantos

I left Whiteley’s Incredible Blue last night with Pound’s verse circling around my head. Barry Dickins’s new play, subtitled “an hallucination”, is almost an essay on the proposition of the difficulty and necessity of beauty, through the medium of the enfant terrible of Australian art, Brett Whiteley.