Bakersfield Mist Tickets

Bakersfield Mist – Witty, wry and dry

Bakersfield Mist proved a surprise hit at Los Angeles’ Fountain Theatre in 2011 when it debuted. Audiences loved it. A witty and wry two-person comedy, it’s a commentary on authenticity in human beings and the art they create. It proved so popular over there that it has transferred across the Atlantic to London's West End for spring 2014.

Officially a work of fiction but apparently based on actual events, the play opens at the Duchess Theatre this spring. It stars the remarkable stage, movie and small screen actress Kathleen Turner as Gutman and Star Wars actor Ian McDiarmid as Lionel Percy, the world-renowned art expert.

Director Polly Teale is in the driving seat. Production by Laurence Miller and Lucie Lovatt, lighting by Oliver Fenwick, scenic design by Tom Piper and sound by Jon Nichols all help make it a play that lovers of fine theatre won’t want to miss.

Bakersfield Mist - The story

Bakersfield Mist is about Maude Gutman, a woman with very little money who lives in a broken-down trailer park in Bakersfield. A fifty-something unemployed barmaid with a drink problem, she spends her time scouring skips, junkyards and charity shops for treasures which she uses to decorate her ugly home.

On one trek for treasure she finds and buys a particularly horrible painting as a joke. About to change her mind and destroy it, she suddenly realises it looks awfully like a Jackson Pollock masterpiece. Could it be worth millions? Might the discovery change her life forever? There’s only one way to find out – call in someone who knows their stuff.

Enter the snobbish art expert Lionel Percy, who soon discovers Maude is a force to be reckoned with, not to be underestimated. The heated conversation that follows is wonderfully witty, a fast-paced exposure of the human condition, the real meaning of authenticity, the art we revere and the intellectual snobbery that pervades it.

In much the same way as Willy Russell’s excellent Educating Rita, the playwright mischievously throws two characters together who would otherwise never meet. The result is a sparks-flying, supremely clever emotional collision between one overeducated man and his intellectual adversary and equal, an extremely street-smart lady.

Bakersfield Mist theatre tickets – Sparks fly when street smarts meet snobbery

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