FringeReview UK 2025
Lee
OnBook Theatre in association with Park Theatre
Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Park Theatre 90, Finsbury Park
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
In Cian Griffin’s slow-burn but fascinating Lee at Park Theatre 90 directed by Jason Moore till October 18, there’s far more: questions of attribution, ownership and the way original ideas get taken up and turned into something more than their originator intended.
The play, like the art, compels itself, and shows why it had to be written.
Review
With that other Lee (Miller) being exhibited at the Tate, there’s interesting questions. And a statement. Why is this play just entitled Lee? It seems set like a tripwire of expectation. And why not Lee Krasner at the Tate again at some point? She’s worth as much attention. And why both women chose to de-feminise their names is clear enough. But in Cian Griffin’s slow-burn but fascinating Lee at Park Theatre 90 directed by Jason Moore till October 18, there’s far more: questions of attribution, ownership and the way original ideas get taken up and turned into something more than their originator intended. Who’s the more original then?
Lee Krasner (a fantastically gnarly-voiced Helen Goldwyn who dominates) encounters shop-store Hank (Will Bagnall) who’s come to take orders, show his own artwork, and is hesitantly armed with a rolled-up picture of a painting Pollock gave his father in lieu of payment in 1945. What? Bagnall’s nervous “ma’am” underscores his whole performance: yet when he’s forced to speak out, there’s the heft of both pain and pride to answer. It’s an appealing, vulnerable performance. Goldwyn several times looks set to eat Bagnall, and not in a nice way. But solely she unpeels Krasner’s essential generosity of spirit, which is large enough to embrace some appalling things her husband perpetrated on her.
Now it’s 1969, 13 years after Jackson Pollock (1912-56) died in a car crash though his mistress survived. Jackson Pollock (Tom Andrews) appears in flashbacks and apparates as a revenant to haunt Krasner with critiques; and berate her with changes to his studio: “I hate what you’ve done with the place,” he complains to laughter. Goldwyn and Andrews clash. He’s every inch the wired genius (if squirrel-brushed, and there’s a tail of jokes there) visiting both wry affirmation and undercutting. Krasner was in many ways liberated by Pollocks’ death. Still known as Mrs Pollock, even her own shows are framed by gallery-owners asking if she can add a couple of Pollocks to make them palatable.
Yet the history, literally unfurled by Hank, brings sharply home how Krasner herself had been at the core of Pollock’s discoveries, indeed at least a co-creator of the dripper technique, and probably more. Krasner though is generous, when the appalled Hank protests in her behalf and offers a critique that’s at the heart of this play and one great reason to see this compelling interrogation of art and originality.
On the way Hank gets lessoned in the history of female artists having dismissed history (though his art knowledge is already impressive, if occasionally wrongly gendered), Hank suddenly recognizes – and applies the lessons of the master about historical attribution and justice. There’s the faintest affinity here with A.A. Milne’s The Truth about Blayds, a 1921 paly of a fictitious poet still playing at the Finborough. Only this is based on truth, and should make us think again.
Goldwyn brings out the paradoxical nature of their creative partnership. Pollock encouraged to a degree (he’s still critiquing to the end, if more warmly, and won’t just get out of Krasner’s head) but in questions and answers she initiates with Hank (it is like a fierce kind of uni interview) Krasner passes on that ferocious collaboration. Eventually Hank can respond, the answers wrenched out of him.
Pollock had wanted children but there was already one baby: “Between you, your ego and me there wasn’t enough space” Krasner counters to Pollock’s harping on never having a relationship with a son; like some Dad4 Justice 40 years too early.
Ian Nichols’s set is a lariat sequence of drips on a white floor, the poor Pollock we tread upon, with simulated Krasner paintings on the wall from late-figurative 1940s through to late 1960s green swirls. The latter’s a bit late de Kooning, despite Krasner’s caution over this high-end importer of food into his concrete tower. Whatever, it’s the one we see Krasner working on, applying greenish water cunningly. Elliott Sheppard’s lighting is the steady studio bulb of tradition.
A play full of jokes and remarkable wisdom when Krasner and Hank engage, it manages to justify a third character, though is – if engagingly – slow-burn earlier on in its 80 minutes (shorter than that advertised, a tribute to directorial pace and acting). Where Andrew and Goldwyn really score together is their mutual respect (occasionally grudging) od the necessity of what they do. There’s subtle shifts from memoried flashbacks to contemporary ghost wielding accurate prophesies of Krasner’s future. It’s here, and in Goldwyn’s and Bagnall’s teasing out truths from each other, that the play, like the art, compels itself, and shows why it had to be written.
Casting Director Susie Parriss, Production Photography Giacomo Gianelli
