Daddy, theatre review: 'This is a play that confounds the regular theatregoer’s every possible expectation'

The walls are festooned with modern art masters such as O’Keefe, Lichtenstein, Sherman and Basquiat. Even his house (design Matt Saunders) looks like a Hockney complete with pool whose length stretches the width of the Almeida’s stage.

Andre’s latest acquisition is not so much an art but an artist. Franklin, played by the mesmerising Terique Jarrett, is an African American rising star who was raised in the God-fearing traditions of the deep South but who is utterly at home in the achingly sophisticated upper echelons of Californian high society.

There is an air of decadence. Andre and Franklin spend much of the time naked by the pool. Their conversation about art is as arch as it is articulate with Franklin able to dent the aesthetic choices of his lover. Aren’t Andre’s choices just a little gauche, asks Franklin. Basquiat paintings exist to disrupt. Putting them together in a bedroom, as Andre has, diminishes the ability of the works to subvert art conventions.

If you are interested in art Harris’s play is full of such interesting chat. Nothing on this level was said in The Collaboration Anthony McCarten’s entertaining but relatively easy play about Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Harris’s work by contrast is much more demanding.

In Danya Taymor’s production a gospel chorus serenades the action. The unabashed nudity collides with surrealism, comedy with drama and there is a strain of satire as Jenny Rainsford’s gallery owner Alessia skewers art world jargon and narcissism.

With the arrival of Franklin’s mother Zora (Sharlene Whyte) ahead of her son’s new exhibition all the elements of a play about a white establishment exploiting a black talent appear to be in place. But Harris has other ideas. Any assumptions about who has the power in the relationship with the white, obscenely rich Andre is ingeniously subverted.

In style and theatrical convention this is a play that confounds the regular theatregoer’s every possible expectation, much like the best modern art.