Kurt and Sid: trials of artistry without the art

An actors’ piece: Danny Dyer as Sid and Shaun Evans as Kurt are both convincing
10 April 2012

Sid Vicious was 21 when he fatally overdosed on heroin in 1979, and Kurt Cobain 27 when he shot himself after taking the same drug 15 years later.

Though their talents were of very different magnitude, their lives and deaths were linked by a strand of rock star delinquency.

In Roy Smiles’s counterfactual play, Sid pays a visit to the Nirvana front man as he contemplates killing himself. Kurt is tired of the attentions of the media and the misappropriation of his music. "Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you," groaned the real Kurt Cobain, and here the stench of justified anxiety is palpable.

When Sid averts Kurt’s suicide, an abrasive debate begins. Initially, the focus is the nature of the visitation: is this Sid a ghost, well-informed imposter or figment of Kurt’s imagination? He certainly seems more articulate than the Sex Pistols’ blundering bassist ever was — and is a moralist to boot, even spouting Latin epigrams.

Kurt is at first hostile to the intrusion, but slowly an understanding develops between the two men. They discuss the price of fame, their drug problems and their emotional entrapments. While Smiles’s script contains some smart lines, there are too many ploys to earn cheap laughs, the exploration of the penalties of genius seems adolescent, and the fundamental premise feels weak.

Tim Stark’s production is conscientious — though a segment in which the two musicians listlessly play ping pong suggests a director fumbling for ideas — and Cordelia Chisholm’s design is detailed, if too extravagantly cluttered for this small space.

As an actors’ piece, the production mostly works. Shaun Evans convinces as the hypersensitive, self-deprecating Kurt. As Sid, Danny Dyer is hungrily charismatic, displaying plenty of his familiar geezerish braggadocio but also an appealing sensitivity.

Neither character in the end appears admirable, and indeed it’s an odd achievement on the part of Smiles to make Sid Vicious marginally more engaging than Kurt Cobain.

However, the real frustration is the absence of the music at the centre of the drama. Imagine a play about Vincent van Gogh in which we didn’t see a single one of his canvases. It’s easy enough to fathom the reasons why the music can be used only incidentally, but the fact remains that this is a drama about the trials of artistry which doesn’t really show us the art for which it is supposed to have been worth suffering.


Until 3 October. Information: 0844 871 7632.

Kurt And Sid
Trafalgar Studios
Whitehall, SW1A 2DY

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