The Arcola Theatre’s new premises at
Dalston Junction are still what an estate agent would call “a
fixer-upper, with tremendous potential”; the front-of-house area is
cramped compared to its original home, but the main space itself has a
height lacking in that converted clothing factory, and retains all its
former flexibility together with the capacity to rake an audience much
more effectively in terms of sightlines.
The
building was originally Reeves’ Printhouse and Colourworks, producing
pigments used by the likes of Constable and JMW Turner, so its opening
commission is appropriately a new play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz dealing
with the life of the latter artist. We see principally Turner’s
relationships with the women in his life: his rejection by his mother,
whose instability led him and his father to commit her to a mental
hospital; his professional association and personal friendship with
prostitute Jenny Cole, whom he hired as an intimate life model; and his
personal relationship with his widowed neighbour Sarah Danby, who bore
him two daughters. Yet none of these connections seem to reach the core
of the man, who lived in seclusion despite his early fame and success
and whose lectures as professor of perspective at the Royal Academy
were mumbled and distrait.
Lenkiewicz’s
portrait of Turner, and Toby Jones’ central performance in Mehmet
Ergen’s production, are faithful to this detachment even at the expense
of drama. If the play were a visual artwork it would be an ink
drawing, quite detailed and representational and thus most unlike the
shimmering play of colour and light in Turner’s own oil paintings, as
suggested by designer Ben Stones on the back wall of the stage. Above
all, this play-drawing would have a broad border of plain white. What
we see of Turner here is precise and well delineated; Jones is, after
all, an excellent actor, more than ably supported by the likes of
Amanda Boxer, Denise Gough and Niamh Cusack, whose features are
naturally inclined towards the sad smile which Sarah wears in the
knowledge that she is not truly loved. But it never seems to amount to
the big picture. Lenkiewicz’s own stepfather was a rather eccentric
artist, and this is her second play (after
Shoreditch Madonna in 2005) which at once attempts to get under the skin of such a figure yet seems reluctant finally to do so.
Written for the Financial
Times.