FringeReview UK 2024

The Girl in the Green Jumper

The Playground Theatre Gail Louw Season

Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, Drama, Live Art, New Writing, Theatre

Venue: The Playground Theatre, Latimer Road W10 6RQ

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“Don’t you fucking move!.. A wife’s duty is… obedience.” This by a man touching 50 in early 1960 to a young woman just 20, who’s dedicated her life to serving him and his art: body, soul, talent, posed body… and muse.

Gail Louw’s International Season of four plays at the Playground Theatre continues with The Girl in the Green Jumper, directed – and with set design – by Christian Holder, at Playground Theatre till March 24^th. It features Peter Tate as artist Cyril Mann (1911-80) and Natalie Ava Nasr as Renske. This two-hander runs for 110 minutes plus a 15-minute interval.

Based on Renske Mann’s illustrated biography, it’s an erudite portrait by an art historian of her time as wife and muse to an artist with an internal saboteur.

Dutch-Indonesian Renske, just arrived in London, asks to be a pupil where Mann’s teaching; and immediately decides to devote herself to this irascible, indeed bipolar artist – often his own worst enemy. How she managed to promote Mann despite himself, stay with him for 20 years till his rages put him beyond Renske and their daughter Amanda’s pale, is perhaps more astonishing.

Renske herself was thwarted by her parents from attending art school. Though a psychic park warden predicted she’d get all the art she needed from her partner – but was puzzled by this vision of a much older man. Must be his father, he thought!

Already a secretary Renske makes her own way through A levels through to an OU Art History degree, encouraged by Cyril Mann.

Natalie Ava Nasr deploys both fluidity and moment to navigate Renske’s rapid development. This means portraying an emerging, very strong personality from ardent but implacable devotion through to other awakenings, intellectual development; personal as well as sexual agency.

Nasr both vocally and physically edges in this slow metamorphosis, aided by Naomi Sorkin’s costume (and set) realisation from duffle-coated ingenue to high-stepping PA with red shoes and salary for Scholl.

Nasr almost sashays through the years contrasting it with sharp interjections that register the gradual polarisation of desires and growth. Rensek wants to speed up, her older husband to slow down.

Peter Tate’s development is necessarily more truncated. Vocally regal – both enjoy great projection and clarity, Tate edges towards an ever-fixed bark as it were.

Tate though can growl down to a terrified vulnerability. His sexism, mild by 1960s standards, own a strange twist: irascible demands even the young Renske’s not prepared to make, rooted in his boyhood thrashings. It’s a feature realised in the play not even in the original memoirs. We find out why.

Tate, whose striking resemblance and hulking presence strikes a chiaroscuro of its own, exudes a tetchiness fined down to rare render moments. There’s Cyril’s frankness to outdo even Renske’s – he’s incapable of flattery, which Renske appreciates – but also overdetermining his world.

Tate isn’t often dangerous. That’s a reflection of a sensitive, acutely self-aware man, though the full bipolar onsets might simply defy depiction. Cyril had conversations with those he admires most: Turner, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Cézanne. All imprint themselves on his work and he believes he speaks to them. Only Turner escapes being called “Ol’ Mike”, or “Ol’ Vincent”, or more respectfully, “Daddy Cézanne”. Renske even early on is having none of it.

Renske’s mix of sexual frankness and truth, her acute intelligence and eye for painting, and her acumen, her capacity as self-propelled PR machine, scouring galleries, at one moment hanging Cyril’s paintings on park railings – which resulted not in sales but ultimately patronage.

Their story unfurls: house-moves masterminded by Renske ripple through Nasr and Tate’s evolving dance as cries, hospitalisations and eventually babies complicate muse/PR and artist. Cyril’s increasing deafness and instability isolate them both.

The climax is painful and wincingly truthful, as Renske takes her life back. And n an unexpected way. Yet as muse, historian and human being she remains essentially true to her husband through and forever after his death.

Cyril Mann’s not unknown. His work’s exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere. The renowned theatre-critic John Russell Taylor devoted a volume to him. Artist and art-critic John Berger admired and bought his work.

Though RA-trained after a boyhood scholarship to Nottingham School of Art, Mann serving with the artillery had no chance to be a war artist; he missed his own generation with whom he had artistically much in common: Ruskin Spears, Keith Vaughan and the slightly younger John Minton and Michael Ayrton. Unlike Mann, they all had chances to paint in the earlier 1940s.

Mann resembles though Turner in dirty skies and trying to outdo him in light-effects. bouncing from his subject, often Renske. There’s Cézanne in brushwork, and Paul Nash. Most of all there’s David Bomberg (1890-1957) whose semi-abstract work also depicted even lowering bomb stores, which later exploded. They pre-echo post-war bombsites Mann depicted and made his own, unfashionable subject-matter by the late 1940s. Even their colour-values are kin.

Holder, ballet dancer and painter as well as director, has made a dance-off of space. First crowding us with the art-school opening to Cyril’s Ernest Bevin council-flat rooms. Then to the amplitude of their Walthamstow apartment filled with light, there’s a paradox: the thrill of early freedom and love is confined, but Renske’s sense of being trapped and Cyril’s mounting rages evoke mental confinements in a larger space.

Bed, easel, chests of drawers, two red chairs (featured in a painting), and notable use of curtained wings morph with the house-moves: gradually clutter’s removed and with a final coup Holder utilises Peter Petr Vocka’s lighting. It’s been throwing chiaroscuro and pinpoint to open and confine, shadow (a Mann standby, from his earlier artificial light painting). But both Holder and Vocka collaborate on a dazzling epiphany, literally painting the light of the sun, as in a Terry Frost St Ives painting. Something Holder knows about.

Most impressive of all perhaps is Helena Hipolito’s rapid-dissolve video-mapping of paintings. It’s a ballet of images apparating at different points in various sizes. Sometimes we’re presented with a triptych of vast canvases, all high-res. At others there’s a small image zeroed onto a tiny frame. Eloise Sheffield’s sound too is discreet, atmospheric and occasionally piercing as of need.

Details of the marriage not revealed in the 2022 biography are lent to this production: the original Renske Mann also attends performances with artist daughter Amanda. On this occasion a revelatory Q&A takes place post-show.

Despite her self-effacement this is Renske Mann’s play. A first-rate production, with West-End values. A must-see.

Published March 18, 2024March 19, 2024 by Simon Jenner