'It’s a picture everyone recognises: Botticelli’s Birth Of Venus; the goddess naked on a seashell with twining golden hair not quite saving her modesty.
Here the painting’s own birth is imagined: Jordan Tannahill’s play is a fictionalised tale of the 15th-century, half-modernised with smartphones and a squash match, and lavishly laced with high camp and nudity.
Dickie Beau is Sandro Botticelli, swaggering about in tattered black jeans... He informs us he wants to tell it his way, and explain something which has flummoxed art historians for centuries: why the most sexually wild Renaissance painter recanted his sins, joined bigoted monk Savonarola and threw many of his paintings on the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities.
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You come away thinking about how artists have had to create beauty under the cosh of ugly patrons..'
