It’s bad enough when
dramatisations cast actors in fictional roles who look completely different
from one’s mental conception of the character, but ‘true story’ dramas can have the complication
of real life likenesses working against audiences’ visual knowledge – a fact especially
true of the main players in the popular Pre-Raphaelite sitcom, which sometimes
seems endlessly rehearsed. So heartfelt
compliments to the casting director and cast of the new play at the Arcola
Theatre, for their vivification of the chief characters, who vividly resemble the
originals and convincingly portray them.
Although Rossetti is rather taller than in life, and Annie Miller too
petite, Holman Hunt, John Ruskin (with a smug, half-fixed smile) and jaunty,
confident John Millais are acutely rendered and all convey a highly plausible
animation, while Emma West the actor playing Lizzie Siddal, with the pearlescent skin
that often goes with copper hair, could
be her double.
The playwright Jeremy Green has
taken on board recent scholarship on Siddal’s artistic aspirations to give her
an active role in the PRB circle. He resisted
the temptation that often makes Rossetti’s charismatic personality dominate the
drama, and remarkably has drawn Gabriel as the sexually reluctant partner in
the relationship (as I have always thought) albeit without quite explaining
this. The first half of the evening is high-spirited
and upbeat, successfully conveying the PRBs’ youthful optimism – I particularly
liked how each young man declared himself a genius – and deftly navigates the
shoals of period misrepresentation. I should
confess to an offstage ‘appearance’ as a Mrs Marsh, whose grizzling twins have
required nearly all the shopkeeper’s supply of laudanum, but an irritating anachronism
to show it being glugged directly from the bottle.
The true pitfall of this type of drama is
the perceived need to stick to historical fact, which tends to fill the scenes
with narrative, unneeded by those who don’t know the story and annoying to
those who do. In Siddal’s case the great
obstacle is her now too-familiar death from an overdose while suffering from
post-natal depression – a truly sad and pathetic end to her young life, but one
that does not contain high-tension drama.
I wished Jeremy Green had departed more vigorously from historical fact,
not perhaps to ignore her death but maybe show it differently, less inevitably,
less pathetically. Or to leave the
audience guessing as to whether or how far Gabriel was responsible for that
fatal dose – a subject on which opinion can still be forceful.
So, a somewhat too faithful re-telling that leaves scope for further episodes
in the romance.
While preparing a course on women artists, I’ve
recently discovered that Edmonia Lewis, the Black American sculptor of mixed
African and Ojibwe descent, spent her last years in London. No one seems to know why she came to
Britain or whom she knew here. Born in
New York in 1844, she had a difficult youth until enrolled at Oberlin College
Ohio during the US Civil War. She studied
art and was funded to travel to Rome, where she flourished as a sculptor,
mainly with dramatic marble figures. Some,
like Forever Free and Hagar
reference her African-American heritage, others like Indian Combat and Minehaha
reference her Native American roots (Longfellow’s Hiawatha being based on Ojibwe tales) Some were portrait busts, the Death of Cleopatra a full-length reclining figure, which went to the centennial
exhibition in Philadelphia and was then lost and damaged before being rescued. Her last recorded work was an Adoration of the Magi (1883). It’s not
yet known when she relocated to London but in 1901 the Census shows her residence as 37 Store Street, Bloomsbury (age 59; birthplace 'India'!; occupation 'artist / modeller', so she was still working in clay) and at the time of
her death in 1907 she was living in Blythe Road west London. She was buried in St
Mary’s the Catholic part of Kensal Rise cemetery. Does anyone know any more about her time in
Britain?
The playwright Jeremy Green has
taken on board recent scholarship on Siddal’s artistic aspirations to give her
an active role in the PRB circle. He resisted
the temptation that often makes Rossetti’s charismatic personality dominate the
drama, and remarkably has drawn Gabriel as the sexually reluctant partner in
the relationship (as I have always thought) albeit without quite explaining
this. The first half of the evening is high-spirited
and upbeat, successfully conveying the PRBs’ youthful optimism – I particularly
liked how each young man declared himself a genius – and deftly navigates the
shoals of period misrepresentation. I should
confess to an offstage ‘appearance’ as a Mrs Marsh, whose grizzling twins have
required nearly all the shopkeeper’s supply of laudanum, but an irritating anachronism
to show it being glugged directly from the bottle. 
