We meet a once famous artist just as she is being promised a comeback after a 10-year slump. Catherine (Mary Rose) is a feminist icon and former YBA who gallerist Christian (Danny Charles) wants to “rediscover”. She is tasked with curating a group exhibition of the nation’s most important female artists, though he mumbles concern over prospective attacks by the media for “wokeness”.
Writer and director Mary Swan certainly knows her subject matter: there are mentions of Charles Saatchi and “Damien” while Catherine’s nonchalance brings Tracey Emin to mind (she is also name-checked). We are even given a fictional catalogue for Catherine’s group exhibition – evidence of the knowledge and attention to detail with which this show has been conceived.
But what follows is a central story of alleged sexual abuse that implicates Catherine (to say more would give the story away) which seems concertinaed into sketches and debates on everything from women’s lesser place in the artistic canon to a condemnation of Pablo Picasso and reflections on the art market by Christian and art collector Robin (Paul Huntley-Thomas).
Catherine, also a teacher of art history, gives us lectures under that flimsy guise, picking over specific works by Lee Miller, talking about their “subconscious ramifications” and, more randomly, analysing Sinéad O’Connor’s controversial tearing up of the pope’s image on Saturday Night Live.
Andrew Tate, Donald Trump and Roe v Wade are mentioned. We are given statistics to back up arguments, too. But the messages of the play are spoken aloud so often, with lessons getting in the way of the drama so much, that the plot-line around sexual abuse is relegated to a few final, complicated, scenes which do not do it justice.
The play constantly changes in form and ends up too clever for its own good. There is an amusing art world satire in which Catherine is in televised conversation with a pretentious art critic who speaks as if permanently gurning. There is also a satirical cookery class on what “ingredients” make a female artist which turns out to be an art installation, along with a quizshow that briefly revisits the question of whether we can enjoy art created by men with predatory or problematic personal lives. We hold up paddles to give our judgments in a breakout moment of audience participation.
These swerves interrupt the drama to such a degree that the emotional or dramatic momentum cannot build, while the performances are not full-bodied enough so fall flat. Ultimately, less would have been much more.
At Omnibus theatre, London, until 3 February
