We are looking at the older Lucian Freud (1922-2011) in his London studio. Its sash windows are boarded up; daylight enters through glass panels overhead. Paint-smeared walls become extensions of the painter’s palette: Carla Goodman’s realistic set also symbolises a life contoured by painting. Freud is looking towards us, but not at us. He is looking at his sitter, who is an invisible presence located on an imaginary bed (or chaise longue) sited between stage and auditorium.
As he studies his subject, Freud talks, answering her questions about his past. We listen. Stories layer; shards of the life of the artist assemble into a picture – memories add shades of meaning to the present instant.
This new play by Alan Franks, who is also a novelist, songwriter and journalist (including for this paper), is beautifully written, elegantly constructed and tantalising. At one point, Franks has Freud describe the moment before a painting comes to life. The play is like that. It’s as though Franks is trying to use Freud’s stories the way Freud uses paint: by building up surface details to arrive at a deeper reality. But the gossipy, name-dropping nature of many of the stories overemphasises the superficial.
The something deeper that doesn’t quite break through is, however, powerfully suggested in Henry Goodman’s performance, as directed by Tom Attenborough. Goodman evokes, beneath an urbane if eccentric exterior, a wild bird of prey. A change in light: he pauses, head tilts, eye glitters – to the canvas; again, a look, a tilt, a jab of the brush. The conversation touches a hidden wound: he groans, hunches. Alone, for a moment, he is in torment.
This biopic engagingly sketches its subject, but the writing suggests as-yet-unrealised possibilities for a more profound exploration of ways of looking at the lives of others.
