Feet up Friday with #TwoRoberts

I went to see John Byrne's play, Colquhoun and MacBryde last night at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow.
I've been keen to see it for ages. He wrote it in 1992 and it tells the tragi-comic tale of Ayrshire-born painters, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.
They were lovers and best friends who fought like proverbial cat and dog. They also shared a deep, unshakeable bond.
During the 1940s they were at the heart of Bohemian London cafe society, mingling with the likes of Wyndham Lewis, Francis Bacon and poets George Barker and Dylan Thomas.
They burnt the candle at both ends and they ultimately burnt themselves out. Colquhoun died in 1962 at the age of just 48 while MacBryde, desolate at the loss of his other half, died in a car accident on a Dublin street four years later. He was 53.
As the Abstract Expressionist movement took hold, their style of expressionist painting went out of fashion. Such is the fickle nature of the art world.
Byrne's play has just two actors. In this new production, Andy Clark plays Colquhoun and Stephen Clyde is MacBryde.
The two men brought the so-called Golden Boys of Bond Street back to glorious yet sensitive life and had the audience laughing and close to tears in equal measure.
The Two Roberts get under your skin. I read Roger Bristow's book, The Last Bohemians, a few years ago. It's a really detailed, intensively researched piece of writing and well worth seeking out.
Tonight, I'm leafing though the catalogue for the Scottish Gallery's forthcoming selling exhibition, The Golden Years.
Much of the work in this exhibition has come from my former art teacher at Kilmarnock Academy, Davy Brown. He's been a passionate advocate and collector of the work of The Two Roberts since the 1960s.
Like Davy and myself, Colquhoun was also a pupil at Kilmarnock Academy. He attended the school in the late 1920s/early 1930s.
Davy remembers the day in 1962 when his art teacher, Jock McKissock, (later head of the art department when I was a pupil in the late 1970s/early 1980s) saying in a shocked voice: "Bobby Colquhoun's dead!" The two men had been contemporaries at Glasgow School of Art.
This year, 2014, marks the 100th anniversary of Colquhoun's birth. MacBryde was born a year earlier, in 1913.
Hence all the Two Roberts activity. There's also a major exhibition of their work in the National Gallery of Scotland, which opens later this month.