John Byrne looks like an artist. Well, he is an artist. And a playwright, film director, and set designer. But, in the studied cool of his dungarees, waistcoat, and carefully groomed moustache ensemble, he looks like an artist, full of beatnik bohemian cool as he takes a fag break from rehearsals of his latest play. And, in art as in life, image and self-mythology is everything. Byrne understands this, as do too the wave of self-conscious self-promoting art stars of the Emin and Hirst variety. And, way way back, before we were famous for 15 minutes and counting downwards, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde understood it, too.Who?
''It's the legend of Colquhoun and MacBryde rather than the true story,'' Byrne readily admits. ''It's the essence of the thing, and Colquhoun and MacBryde can tell the story far better than I can.''
With this in mind, the two-man version of the play that premieres at Dundee Rep next week is a far cry from the London production at the dawn of the nineties that required 14 actors.
''I knew in the first week of rehearsals,'' Byrne recalls, ''that I wanted to re-write it for two actors, but it was too late by then because it had all been cast.''
As it was, that first production of Colquhoun And MacBryde met with what is diplomatically termed a ''muted response'', and disappeared quickly. But not before Byrne was forced to defend his work, as much to the public as the critics. It's only in the past couple of years that Byrne has felt distanced enough from the experience to revisit the play. While Byrne never met them, by the time he arrived at art school Colquhoun and MacBryde were already a legend.
''Everybody I met had a different story about them,'' Byrne recalls, ''and I just wanted to do a story that, if not true, you would want it to be true.'' This again brings us into the area of artistic mythology. Byrne's play itself finds one artist saying to the other how they were ''creating their own legends'', and half the time it is the bad behaviour of such enfant terribles that find immortality, overshadowing any creative output. Think of such diverse mavericks as Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Joseph Beuys, or Jeff Koons.
Each in different ways understood it was their image they were selling as much as their art. And, as they were selling themselves, theirs was an image they must live up to. These days it's called marketing, and a whole industry of spin provides the infrastructure. Of course, the penchant for self-destruction is paramount to the artistic myth as well. And Colquhoun And MacBryde is a classic tale of backstreet boys with ideas above their station storming the palaces of culture, only to be seduced by the seemingly limitless pleasures such citadels have on offer.
In the play they talk about ''Jackson Pollock's dungarees'', and adopt the look, not so much as a fashion statement as a declaration of war. Byrne himself, clad in such similarly artistic dungarees, says he, too, was tempted by such notions of fame and fortune, but ''something always pulled me back. But you were hungry, and you did want to be the first artist to make it in London, and you did want to be famous."
Byrne is philosophical about it now:
''As you get older it becomes less important to impress people in that way. But these people who become superstars, they're not there by accident. They've pushed for that, and they've worked for that, and that's where it so often all goes wrong.''
Does it have to be that way?
''I don't know,'' says Byrne. ''I would like to think not, but I just don't know.''
Survival in the dirty world of the arts, then, would seem to be about the difference between creating the myth and believing in it. Then again, if Colquhoun and MacBryde had've curbed their excesses and mellowed into elder statesmanshiprather than crashing and burning in the way they did, the myth would have been somewhat different. As it is, Colquhoun And MacBryde is what we've got, a bitterly funny tale of stars burning out too soon with a sadness at its heart.
For, as they banter and bicker from Glasgow bedsit-land to London society and back again, Colquhoun and MacBryde are everything to each other, the ultimate artistic double-act. As personal and professional partners, the two Roberts' knockabout sparring is rooted in Glasgow music hall routines, and, as in the funniest comedy, has a heartbreaking pathos at its core. Think of the misguided aspirants of Steptoe And Son, or any number of Samuel Beckett's co-dependents, whose mutual repellence is the closest thing to love they can find, and is the very thing that binds them.
''It had to be funny,'' says Byrne, immediately recognising his characters' antecedents. ''Because, if something wasn't funny, I wouldn't want to watch it, so I have to have that there, just to make me laugh more than anything. Whether this play is doing anything deeper than that isn't for me to say. I just hope someone doesn't try to send me to prison this time.'
Colquhoun and MacBryde is at Dundee Rep from Wednesday next week until April 1, with previews Saturday and Tuesday.
The Herald, March 16th 2000
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