Great drama, even if it no longer shocks

THE BEARD
Old Red Lion Theatre

LEADING Beat Generation writer Michael McClure sparked now legendary controversy when his play, The Beard, debuted in San Francisco in 1965.
At the end of just its fifth public performance, actors Billie Dixon and Richard Bright were hauled off the stage by police, arrested, and charged with obscenity, conspiracy to commit a felony and lewd or dissolute conduct in a public place.
It was the final flagrant scene depicting oral sex that so incensed the authorities, the culmination of the play’s simmering sexual tensions.
Today, the play is stripped of its power to shock, simply because sex is commonplace.
The Beard is centred around an imaginary meeting between Hollywood blonde bombshell Jean Harlow and American Old West outlaw Billy the Kid.
It opens with the pair pacing round a blue velvet chaise-longue, beneath a chandelier, locked into an electrically charged sexual game.
Delicately poised, the power balance wavers between Victoria Yeates’s sassy floozy Harlow and Christopher Daley’s strutting Billy the Kid, both excellently portrayed, especially Yeates’s flashing-eyed angry starlet.
Set in the blue velvet of eternity, the dialogue is repetitive and visceral; sensual dark poetry comes to life, which makes it appeal on an instinctive level.
While you won’t be thinking of The Beard’s finale next month, this production is undoubtedly a powerful piece of drama.

Until August 12
020 7837 7816

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