Penelope’s perfect in her stage masterclass
The Bay At Nice (Menier Chocolate Factory, London) Verdict: Penelope Wilton brings art history alive
SHOULD you ever find yourself in a tight spot, needing to interest an audience in a discussion about art, freedom and responsibility, here’s how you do it.
One: Cast Penelope Wilton as your leading lady.
Two: Toy with your audience about whether or not you’ll show them the painting under discussion. Three: Do not exceed 75 minutes. This is the cunning plan which underpins Sir richard eyre’s revival of Sir David Hare’s 1986 play about a sixtysomething woman (Downton abbey’s Wilton) invited to the Hermitage Museum in 1950s Leningrad to authenticate a painting by the French artist Henri Matisse.
The artist himself has been dead for two years and the museum’s curators have exhausted their own bureaucratic checks.
Wilton’s character, Valentina, is a former pupil of Matisse who, in addition to pointers about painting may have had carnal knowledge of the great man. Her visit to the Hermitage, 40 years on, is therefore a chance to revisit her past.
It’s also a chance to deal with her daughter, who has followed Valentina to the museum in the hope of borrowing some cash to help her through a divorce. It is, you may guess, a rather contrived scenario, but thanks to her enormous stage magnetism, Wilton pulls it off.
She is not one of those performers who flaps and raves. She may have a wry, slightly headmistressy quality, but she has warmth and focus, too.
Hare’S plot doesn’t challenge Wilton too much; and restricts her to reminiscences about her bohemian past in Paris. Yet the actress never seems less than completely immersed in her memories.
She also stings deliciously when scolding her 37-year-old daughter Sophia for leaving her husband; or when curtly dispensing advice to Sophia’s 63-year-old admirer.
Wilton’s strength as a performer makes for a great bulwark against the hectoring attentions of Ophelia Lovibond as her child.
Lovibond is brilliant in her own way: vexed, confused and infuriated with her mother’s diffidence. But she is also anxious that wanting to leave her husband (an upright Communist Party member) may be part of a ‘decadent fantasy’.
There are shades of Tolstoy’s tragic heroine anna Karenina about Sophia, but as her model aircraft enthusiast lover, David rintoul is no Count Vronsky.
He’s more of a Chekhov desperado, agonising about being unhappy but insisting on soldiering on just the same.
Much more suitable for Sophia would be the museum’s dapper and intelligent, but nervously deferential, young curator (Martin Hutson). Fotini Dimou’s set design is suitably artistic: elegantly conjuring up the grandeur of Peter the Great’s Hermitage in the boutique Menier with an expanse of parquet, some dusty old canvases, pale turquoise panelled walls, and a gorgeous medieval tapestry, glimpsed off.
This one-act play may be a cerebral hour-and-a-quarter, but its meditations on living with the decisions that we make in life are freighted with wit and sophistication.
and it holds your attention, by making you wonder if you’re ever going to see the Matisse in question, which sits under a dust sheet like a fifth character.
I’m not sure the evening would have worked without that tease — but it definitely wouldn’t work without Wilton’s quiet charisma, bathing Hare’s play in sunlight.