Buggers is a highly praised Edinburgh Festival play about the volatile relationship between painter Francis Bacon and his lover and muse, George Dyer. The review finds Alistair Hall’s researched but intensely physical drama fresh and affecting, presenting their love as a mixture of desire, cruelty, power and grief.

Hall plays Bacon opposite Peter Clements’s Dyer, whose transformation from swaggering lover to a vulnerable man affected by alcoholism is singled out. Beginning with their meeting in 1963 and ending with Dyer’s death in Paris in 1971, the production uses movement, shifting timelines and abstract staging; despite occasional opacity, it is described as a small, near-perfect festival production.