"What makes my Bacon recognisable?"

says Pip Utton. "I look like him, I dress like him, I sound like him, I swear like him and I get absolutely bladdered. Two bottles of champagne per show."

Currently playing the celebrated 20th-century painter Francis Bacon, Utton is a master of the one-man show.

Since coming into the profession ten years ago, untrained and at the age of 45, he has written and performed shows about Edmund Kean, the biblical Joseph, Roy Orbison and even Hitler.

First staged in 1998, Adolf became one of the most successful one-man shows of all time and recently led to Utton playing the dictator in the BBC's Days That Shook The World.

"All the historical characters I play have become almost mythological, which makes them a little bit two-dimensional,"

he says. "What I hope to do is take away the myth, to make them 3-D. That doesn't mean they're all nice people. I don't think anyone would describe Adolf Hitler as a well rounded human being. But he did have other qualities than the cartoon bad bastard."

Utton's Bacon, too, is a complex character, and this is certainly no cosy "audience with". The artist talks about his work and his scant regard for the critics, but also about his affairs with George Dyer and Peter Lacey, his tendency for "hard, submissive homosexual sex", the amount he drinks and the people he has lost.

"He's a tormented soul who craved affection and love, and in some ways, perhaps because he was such a genius, his faults and needs and desires were blown out of all proportion," says Utton.

"He's camp, he's bitchy, he's waspish, he's an absolute gift. I've almost fallen in love with Francis Bacon."

Utton is careful, he says, never to start researching someone he could never look anything like. The idea for a show about an Elvis Presley tribute act was rejected for this reason. But he finds that "this big fat rubber face can look like so many people".

Meanwhile the set, with three coloured screens on which Utton casts his shadow, is an attempt to recreate "the unexpected atmosphere of a Bacon painting".

  • Starts at 8pm. Tickets cost £8.50 and £6.50, call 01273 709709.