The Two Roberts by Damian Barr audiobook review – love and lost dreams in bohemian London

This fictionalised account of the relationship between real-life artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun vividly depicts their romance and rise to fame – and the fall from grace that followed

The artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun first met in 1933 as talented young students at the Glasgow School of Art. From that moment on, these two working-class men from Ayrshire lived, worked and loved together at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Moving to London, they found fame in the art world, where they were nicknamed MacBraque and McPicasso. Against a backdrop of war, they drank, partied, were photographed by Vogue and spent more money than they earned.

In his fictionalised biography, Damian Barr charts the relationship of this largely forgotten pair, which spanned 26 years, drawing on what is known about their lives and work, and using creative licence to fill in the gaps. We first meet them as students lying on a hillside above Glasgow, “curled like commas, naked in the nest they’ve rolled in the high golden grass”. The pair lodge in the attic of a wealthy widow, where they subsist on stew and form a protective barrier around themselves. They are, observes Barr, “as careful as scared people should be”.

The narrator is the theatre and voice actor Michael Abubakar who inhabits our protagonists with tenderness and depth: his Bobby is charming and mercurial while Robert is reserved and wary. The couple’s rise in bohemian London, where they hang out with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, is vividly depicted, as is their descent back to obscurity in the postwar years. As the art world shifted its focus, embracing the abstract expressionism of Pollock and friends, the two Roberts found themselves out of favour, washed up and broke.

• Available via Canongate Books, 11hr 39min.

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