AustLit

'It is not very well known that Paul Cezanne, the great painter whom Picasso described as "The father of us all," was a schoolboy friend of the acclaimed novelist, Emile Zola, famous not only for his prodigious output of ground-breaking novels, but also for his engaged political stance, culminating in his famous declaration of "J'accuse" in the infamous Dreyfus case, when France's anti-semitism was exposed to the world; but such is the case. Two great geniuses, born in Aix en Provence in France's south a year apart, each a revolutionary in his own way, Cezanne in his solitary field of painting, Zola in a much more public way, forthrightly standing against the terrible excesses of capitalism and bourgeois power in nineteenth century France, and paying for it in forced exile and - still many believe - with his life.

'And through it all the two remaining friends for decades.

'Until Zola's terrible betrayal when he depicted Cezanne as the failed painter in his novel The Masterpiece.

'The Bathers is a play depicting the end of their friendship on one terrible night as the two great men confront their past and their weaknesses. Written by one of Australia's most celebrated playwrights, it questions the nature of truth, of loyalty and of idealism as seen through the lens of two passionate men struggling to hold onto their love for one another while being torn apart by the unruliness of their spirits.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.