Review: Lee (Park Theatre)

Review by Sam Waite

⭐️⭐️⭐️

After her passing in the 1980’s, an art critic would refer to the artist Lee Krasner as the “Mother Courage of Abstract Expressionism.” During her lifetime, she recalled her teacher, Hans Hofmann, playing his first compliment to her work: “This is so good, you would never know it was done by a woman.” With these two quotes it’s easy to understand the thesis of Cian Griffin’s bio-play Lee, as it arrives at London’s Park Theatre – women artists have always been shunned from the spotlight, their brilliance an afterthought until they’re no longer around to receive the praise.

When we meet Lee, she is an expressive, fiercely-focused painter first, and a widowed spouse second. She has taken over the studio space was belonging to her late husband, the better-known Jackson Pollock, and it seems as if Hank, the young man hired to fetch her groceries, may be the only person she has any real interaction with. Things go as we expect that they usually do, until Hank mentions that he’ll be city-bound for school soon, and the quiet revelation that he himself is going to art school, and wouldn’t mind her professional eye over his portfolio, begins a dramatic battle between Lee’s present and difficult truths in her past.

The studio, courtesy of designer Ian Nicholas, sets a vivid and immersive scene. As the audience step across the paint-splattered floor to reach their seats, there are paintings hung along the walls extending beyond the stage itself, and at the centre is a high table already littered with paints, brushes, scraps of paper, and paint-dyed jars of water from the nearby sink. Park Theatre’s Park90 provides an intimate space where a reversal of the anticipated opening moment can smoothly take place – as the show begins, Eliott Dheppard’s lighting frightens the space rather than dimming, the audience not being separated from now-illuminated action but drawn sharply into a colourful but combative space.

Cian Griffin proves knowledgeable about art history, something Lee holds dear and chastises Hank’s lack of familiarity with, and manages to create a diatribe in which Ms Krasner is literally listing women painters without it being stilted or inauthentic. He writes Lee as brusque rather than unkind, as short and to the point rather than sadistic or openly cruel. When her dialogue drifts into quips or barbs at Hank’s expense, the sense is that she merely doesn’t think about the impact of words beyond what is intended, adding to the sense that he has built up walls throughout her life and has never seen fit to lower them.

Unfortunately, where the writing suffers is in talking around key points where the audience has had so much time to piece a twist together that the impact is totally lost. Hank is written to be less introspective and ceaselessly intellectual than the persona Lee has built, rather than being stupid, but at one point he is so slow on the uptake that it’s hard to decide whether it’s more frustrating that he isn’t getting it or that she doesn’t just tell him. This lingering quality over a central revelation undoes some of the grace the remainder of his script gives to the pair, and the effect is Hank seeming as dim-witted as Lee seems game-playing and mean-spirited.

Moments where Lee remembers Pollock, particularly where she drifts between these reminiscent fantasies and her ongoing conversation with Hank, are some of the play’s strongest moments. Their placement and limited use do leave them feeling inconsequential, as if merely a way to include Pollock as a character, but their impact is strong enough that they continue to be welcome. Despite the limited scope this presence allows for, Tom Andrews is a commanding figure as the late painter, someone you could understand being caught up in memories of, and I might have preferred his contributions to be more firmly embedded in the narrative.

Will Bagnall gives a consistently likable, entirely human quality to Hank. This is a young man who has never been tasked with the grandiose, existential questions with which Krasner finds herself continually faced with answering and asking, and Bagnall carries the part with the right blend of bemusement and warmth. As Lee herself, Helen Goldwyn shines in moments of introspection, a real master of subtlety and of letting us see in her face that complex feelings are bubbling beneath the surface. A couple of the more outwardly emotive moments don’t land as strongly, a touch of artifice to that mask dropping, the Goldwyn is so commanding in the remainder of the performance that it hardly matters.

Jason Moore’s direction is assured and confident throughout, leaning into the intimacy of a single space while examining decades of life and work rather than feeling confined by it. Under Moore’s guidance, the performances all clearly belong to the same world, and do not clash with one another even when backstories and viewpoints are so vividly at odds, a unity central to a story set within the art world and about those who work within it feeling authentic.

Not a masterpiece but far more than a amateur doodling in the margins, Lee opens up, and is open to, prescient questions about the artistic community which remain sadly relevant decades after its 1960’s setting. Decades after her passing, Lee Krasner is still best-known for her relationship with a male artist, and any work seeking to bring attention to long-neglected artists is a victory in my eyes.

Lee plays at the Park Theatre until October 18th

For tickets and information visit https://parktheatre.co.uk/events/lee/

Photos by Giacomo Giannelli