The Painter

The fashionables, they tell me their artistic opinion. They just want to know if a painting is hot. Whether it will gain. And then they criticise anyone who is different, anyone who's not on the 'direct route' to taste. Fuck 'em. Turner, the English romantic landscape artist and 'painter of light', was a man obsessed. Intensely prolific he was heavily reliant on his father, deeply affected by his mother's rejections and isolated from the usual breed of artists. English painting is dead. It's dealers making fortunes out of sentimental dross. Dogs. Cherubs. 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 Ashton Street.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's plays include The Night Season (National Theatre, Critics' Circle's Most Promising Playwright Award, 2004) and Her Naked Skin (National Theatre, 2008), which was the first play by a living female playwright to be staged on the Olivier stage. Other plays include The Invisible (The Bush), Jane Wenham, Soho, The Painter (Arcola), The Typist (Riverside Studios), The Lioness (Tricycle), That Almost Unnameable Lust, Shoreditch Madonna, Blue Moon over Poplar (Soho Theatre), A Soldier's Tale (Old Vic), Invisible Mountains (National Theatre), Faeries (Royal Opera House), Justitia (Peacock Theatre), and adaptations of Ibsen's Ghosts (Arcola) and James's The Turn of the Screw (Almeida). Film includes Colette, Disobedience and Ida, co-written with Pawel Pawlikowski, which won a BAFTA and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, 2015.