The Painter

Description

The fashionables? They just want to know if a painting's hot. Whether it will gain.Queen Victoria said of Turner, 'He is quite mad.' A cockney who spoke his mind, he did not fit into the norm of the artist. Society saw him as a misfit, shocking, controversial. He was a visionary, the father of modern painting. The play examines his relationship to three women in his life. English painting is dead. It's dealers making fortunes out of sentimental dross. Cherubs. Dogs. The Painter by Rebecca Lenkiewicz premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, in January 2011 in the production which marked the opening of its new premises on Ashwin Street.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's first play, Soho - a Tale of Table Dancers, won a Fringe First at Edinburgh and opened the Arcola Theatre in 2001. The Night Season, which opened at the National Theatre in 2004, received the Critics' Circle's Most Promising Playwright Award and was nominated for the Charles Wintour Evening Standard Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Her Naked Skin premiered in the Olivier at the National Theatre in 2008. Other plays include Shoreditch Madonna, Blue Moon over Poplar (Soho Theatre), A Soldier's Tale (Old Vic), Invisible Mountains (National Theatre Education Department), Faeries (Royal Opera House), Justitia (Peacock Theatre), an adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (Arcola Theatre), Fighting for Words and Caravan of Desire (both BBC Radio 4).