FringeReview UK 2024
Beryl Cook: A Private View
Kit Thompson in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
Genre: Biographical Drama, Comedic, Fringe Theatre, Live Art, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatrical Clown
Venue: Finborough Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Kara Wilson writes, acts directs and paints Beryl Cook: A Private View at the Finborough till October 26th. Wilson like Cook is teasingly subtle, with Cook clues for the initiated laid like trip-wires in Juliette Demoulin’s set, and in Wilson’s text. Above all the mystery of laughter, far below the sightline of the blinkered. A further triumph in Wilson’s groundbreaking fusion of words and paint.
Till October 26th
Review
“George, remember I have the final say in what goes out.” 2005. A woman nearing 80 speaks into a running BBC camera. She’s alone. Kara Wilson writes, acts directs and paints Beryl Cook: A Private View at the Finborough till October 26th; fresh from its Edinburgh premiere at the Pleasance finishing late August.
Paints. Wilson paints a single canvas of Cook’s ‘Girls’ Night Out’ in every performance lasting around 70 minutes. It’s a vibrant, faithful homage to the original, lacking only time-consuming subtleties – a word some critics might foolishly deride. Only the outlines have been drawn in. It’s oil too: the linseed hits your nostrils as you sit a few feet from Wilson’s twirling brush. Each completed painting is then available for £50.
This is Wilson’s fifth one-woman-as-artist show. Starting in 1997 with Scottish artist Bessie Mc Nicol, she appeared in 1998 with Deco Diva about the extraordinary post-cubist Tamara de Lempicka, who directly influenced Cook. Bloomsbury Bell on Vanesa Bell followed in 2007; and Art Angel on Angelica Kaufmann in 2022 preludes not just Cook but Now You See Us, the Tate Britain exhibition featuring Kauffmann and many British women artists 1540-1940.
Wilson is consummate enough to reveal that Cook (1926-2008) is a paradox. Clearly full of subversive wit and enjoying incognito nights out in sleazy bars to sketch or memorise nightlife scenes, she was painfully shy.
When awarded an OBE she asked for a private ceremony via a sheriff in her home town of Plymouth. Yet for years she’d run a hands-on B&B with her family, taking breakfast to her guests. Who boggled at paintings everywhere, even on top of and underneath toilet seats. Cook was an obsessive painter. Yet Cook’s first work dates from 1960 when she was 34.
Entitled ‘Hangover’ a copy displays a woman with breasts falling outside her dress – a remarkably assured and witty debut. But this, Wilson tells us was painted in Southern Rhodesia, after Cook persuaded her maritime husband John not to become Captain Cook but a car-dealer. She, John and son John (who collaborated with the show) spent 1956-66 there. Not a hint of the regime and the return is put down to bouts of fever. Wilson’s approach is to tell it straight, as she mesmerises with a paintbrush, adroitly managing to turn to the audience and rarely turn her back on them.
Born middle-class, Cook yet portrays mostly working-class people, leading to critical sniping at her appropriation. The public though judge differently.
Cook’s familiar paintings, mainly larger women and men (to minimise background she claimed) are both assured and weird. Stanley Spencer’s large people certainly inspired her, and Edward Burra’s surreal sleaze-scenes, without his darkness. De Lempicka though with her bright primaries gleaming on limbs and clothing like metal definitely leave a sheen; and develop Spencer’s thrust of folk into a more congested post-cubist huddle. You wish the two might have met: Cook would have found the Polish aristocrat overwhelming but prone to laughter over sex.
Wilson charms as she narrates an eventful but not overly dramatic history: yet it’ s entrancing without a single longeurs. There’s no pause even whilst Wilson paints a tricky line (the green thong, for instance). Cook emerged from 1975 when another actor Joanna Tope spent a week in the B&B and demanded the local art dealer see Cook’s paintings. They sold out at an exhibition and very soon Cook was the subject of a BBC documentary, becoming world-famous. But Nicholas Serota led sneerers declaring “No Beryl Cook will hang at the Tate.” He hasn’t yet got a grave to spin in, but one recently has.
Cook avenged herself on one overtly friendly critic who wrote scathingly, by portraying him in women’s underwear bashing his… typewriter. A similar fate attended nasty neighbours who unsuccessfully sued Cook for painting them naked. And when a can of literal shit by Piero Manzoni was chosen by the Tate over a Cook, Cook had much fun as Wilson relates. In 2006 Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones exploded: ”Fans of Beryl Cook disqualify themselves by definition from expressing an opinion about modern art.” Pity, since I write about it too.
The Finborough’s Resident Assistant Designer Juliette Demoulin crafts a painting studio set in white with lariat splodges of Cook wit: a Dali (or Edward Burra) of bric-a-brac with quirks, riffing off the paintings themselves giving off clues to a deeper aesthetic. A genuine Cook painting lounges in the studio enfiladed by key scattered motifs
from Cook works: most strikingly a dummy’s leg clad in tiger print leggings. And to rhyme with it, draped leopard-skin jacket c. 1975: Cook has a thing about spots and stripes. There’s feather trimmed latex gloves, a pair of patent heels from some venerable clubber.
Wilson herself is striped too, in black and white, a bit like a Bridget Riley at rest. As she draws on Cook’s world Venus Raven’s lighting softens or darkens, and resident sound designer Edward Lewis creates a delicate unfussy envelope. Suddenly lights up and a cheery Q&A of no more than 10 minutes follows immediately and a modest sales pitch.
Wilson like Cook is teasingly subtle, with Cook clues for the initiated laid like trip-wires in Demoulin’s set, and in Wilson’s text. There’s hints of trauma, spaces unsaid, the fact Cook’s happily-married son is also a recluse. Above all the mystery of laughter, far below the sightline of the blinkered. A further triumph in Wilson’s groundbreaking fusion of words and paint.
Written, performed and directed by Kara Wilson
Set Designer, Juliette Demoulin, Lighting Designer Venus Raven Sound Designer, Edward Lewis, Stage Manager Ted Walliker, Producer Kit Thompson
Social Media and Marketing Lal Yolgecenli
Kit Thompson in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
General Manager Caitlin Carr and Jillian Feuerstein, Assistant General Manager, Kit Thompson