The best theatre plays about art, from Sunday in the Park with George to Red – Evening Standard

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Plays about art have the potential to be masterpieces or just painfully pretentious. Its a fine line, but the ones that do it well can create a thing of beauty.

There are plenty of discussions to be had about the nature of responsibility and truth when it comes to art, and artists lives have depths of drama, hedonism and anguish to be plumbed for the stage.

From biographies to surreal musings on obsession, here are some the plays about art to seek out:

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John Logans Red was inspired by a trip to Tate Modern, where he saw Mark Rothkos Seagram Murals. He said that as soon as he read the label recounting how they were created, the entire play came to him. Set in fifties New York, Rothko (originally played by Alfred Molina) is under commission to paint a series of murals for an upscale new restaurant. His assistant (a fictional character named Ken initially played by Eddie Redmayne and, later, Alfred Enoch) challenges him on accepting a commercial endeavour. In reality, Rothko told Harpers Bazaar his reasoning, saying: I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

Yasmina Rezas French three-hander stood the test of time. It ran for eight years in the West End (with everyone from Albert Finney to Richard Griffiths to the League of Gentleman in the casts), and returned for its 20 year anniversary to the Old Vic in 2016 with Rufus Sewell, Tim Key and Paul Ritter. A play about art and friendship, it sees a 15-year-long bond between three men tested when one buys an incredibly expensive, completely white painting or a piece of white shit. The play has been translated into 20 languages, with the English version adapted by Christopher Hampton.

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French pointillist artist George Seurats painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapines musical. The story focuses on the painter and his great-grandson, also called George and also an artist, who grapples with the same ideas of artistic inspiration a century later. As the song goes: There are worse things than staring at the water as you're posing for a picture being painted by your lover, in the middle of the summer.

Artemisia Gentileschi's significance in Western art history has only recently been appreciated. In her lifetime, her talents were overshadowed by a sexual assault. In 1612, Agostino Tassi was tried for the rape of the painter when she was just 15, in a case that lasted seven months and gripped Renaissance Rome. Breach Theatre turned the real court transcripts from the trial into a new show. Bringing together myth, history and contemporary commentary, the play asks how much has changed in the intervening centuries and tells the story of a woman who took revenge through her art. The play was supposed to have a Barbican run, but instead streamed online over lockdown.

Nick Dears play, set in 18th century London, compresses the events of ten years of William Hogarths life into one single night. Michael Kitchen, Niamh Cusack and Simon Russell Beale were part of the opening RSC cast in 1986. According to Dear, what started as a play about the political manipulation of art turned into a lurid comedy of sexual manners, telling of the escapades of artists, politicians and royalty, and debating the nature of ambition, gender and the artists responsibility.

Another play that was supposed to open in London only to be scuppered by the pandemic is Jeremy O. Harriss melodrama Daddy. Franklin, a young Black artist about to embark on his first show, meets Andre, an older, wealthy, white art collector. He moves into Andres Bel Air home, where the action takes place in and around a real swimming pool, sunken into the stage. A surreal exploration of art, intimacy, identity and commodification follows, with George Michaels Father Figure playing in the background.

Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb, a pair of conceptual artists described as the most ferociously uncompromising voice of their generation, are the subject of Tim Crouchs experimental 2014 play. Adler has died, leaving her partner behind. Lou, formerly an art student and now an actress making a film about the object of her life-long obsession, Adler, breaks into the artists home unaware that Gibb is still living in it. Adler & Gibb looks at the pretensions of the art world and the way in which people leech off those they admire. Crouch said: The story developed over five years and still, even in rehearsal, I didnt know quite what it was.

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Originally titled Little Dancer after the statue that inspired it, Tony Award-winner Lynn Ahrens new musical imagines the life of Marie, the 14-year-old ballet dancer who disappeared from records after she posed for Edgar Degas. As a young woman, she is pulled between her love and her talent as a dancer, with the musical showing the well-trodden conflict between life and art. Its early days for this play, but we hope there will be more theres always room for a ballet/musical crossover.

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The best theatre plays about art, from Sunday in the Park with George to Red - Evening Standard