In the intimate surrounds of the fortyfivedownstairs theatre, accompanied by the jazz sounds of The Calvert George Fine trio, the capricious genius of Brett Whiteley bursts once more into incandescent life. Penned by award-winning playwright and Whiteley biographer, Barry Dickins, and performed by the acclaimed Neil Pigot, this is the world premiere of a new and controversial rendering of Whiteley’s life.

A hallucinatory exploration of Whiteley’s life and art, Whiteley’s Incredible Blue is a one-man theatrical fever dream, an urgent swell of colour, sound and language.

Cast in the luminescent ultramarine blue that became the artist’s hallmark, and interwoven with a live free-jazz performance, Whiteley’s Incredible Blue burrows a rambling excavation through the thoughts and digressions, passions and fears of a man – Australian art’s most vivid and conflicted character.

Less pure biography than a journey into the swirling imagination and creeping addictions that pushed Whiteley to the very edges of artistic expression, Whiteley’s Incredible Blue is an unflinching and poetic depiction of a remarkable mind, both tormented and free, hurtling toward destruction in the moment of greatest creative release.