Robert Tanitch reviews Bakersfield Mist at Duchess Theatre, London WC2
Stephen Sachs’s two-hand play premiered in Los Angeles in 2011 at the Fountain Theatre, where Sachs is the artistic director. Bakersfield Mist, which lasts 85 minutes and is acted without interval, was inspired by true events.
A middle-aged woman buys an ugly painting she loathes for $3.00 as a joke present; but later she comes to believe it is by Jackson Pollock and contacts a world class art expert, hoping he will authenticate it.
The frumpish woman, who worked as a bar-tender until she was sacked, lives in a junk-filled trailer in Bakersfield. The painting could be worth millions.
Bakersfield is en route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, The contrast between the woman and the expert is sharp: a clash of class and culture: trailer trash versus Manhattan sophistication, ignorance versus learning.
Is it a fake or a genuine Jackson Pollock? Who decides what is genuine or fake and how do they know? (They are experts and just know.) How valid is expert opinion when it is merely opinion and not measurable fact?
The key moment is when she attempts to destroy the painting and he stops her. Stephen Sachs’s play may be fake, but Kathleen Turner and Ian McDiarmid are always very watchable.
Turner, last seen on the London stage when she appeared in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2006, has the woman’s defiance and resilience. McDiarmid has the connoisseur’s comic superciliousness.
“My opinion means something,” he says. “Yours does not.” His judgement is as quick on art as he is on people. He proves to be wrong about the woman. Could he also be wrong about the painting?
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