Scarlet Sunday. Omnibus Theatre.

“Art is what you can get away with,” intones a cynical Andy Warhol. But what can an artist get away with in the process of producing great art? And can one ever really separate the results of the artistic process from the process itself? Comedy thriller Scarlet Sunday, writer James Alston’s highly assured debut as a solo playwright, muses over the questions. The result a tautly crafted, zippy, and often very funny 75 minutes that evokes shades of The Picture Of Dorian Gray and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.

Yasmin (Sorcha Kennedy with the comic sparkle of a young Catherine Tate) is a gregarious hack art blogger with a passion for iced latte and a yearning to write something with more academic impact than “Britain’s top ten galleries for selfies”. She spies an opportunity in buttoned-up, short-story writer Ava (an ice-cold Camilla Aiko on top form), daughter of the recently demised Roy Blackwood. Known as Britain’s Picasso and “the greatest artist of our age”, rumours abound that Blackwood’s unseen final work, Scarlet Sunday, may be his magnum opus. Get Ava helps in locating and revealing the work thinks Yasmin, and her journalistic future will be assured.

Yasmin inveigles an invitation from a suspicious and troubled Eva (“I grow on people” Yasmin assures her) to the late, great master’s studio. “This isn’t a home, it’s a chapel, a cathedral” the fawning blogger says on crossing the gloomy threshold. Cat Fuller’s set, derelict furniture, canvases shrouded under white awnings, evokes a fittingly menacing undercurrent of hidden mystery.

Dark secrets soon emerge about the horrors behind Blackwood’s process in creating Scarlet Sunday. “Dad used us for his work… what you loved was a lie” Eva confesses to a mortified Yasmin, before demanding her help in setting fire to the masterpiece. But are any of us justified in destroying artistic perfection simply to set free the soul of the muse? It is a question both characters must urgently face.

Alston’s cracking dialogue works best in the scrappy bickering between the two protagonists. Director Imy Wyatt Corner has them circling each other warily in the constrained confines of the studio, like boxers in an extended and highly competitive verbal sparring match. Yasmin’s self-serving machinations in building rapport with a traumatised and damaged Eva are exposed with deft comic precision. “It’s scorchio” says Ava of the weather, but it is true too of the dynamic between this duo. Opinions will vary as to whether the ending makes sense but there is much fun to be had on the way.

Writer: James Alston

Director: Imy Wyatt Corner