The whitewash is barely dry on the exposed bricks of the Arcola’s evocative new building, the former Reeves’s paint factory, opposite Dalston Junction. The new theatre’s first commission, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, exposes another layer of nineteenth-century London where artists like Turner (‘The Painter’ of the title) worked in vivid new colours made here at the Artists’ Colour Works. It’s fascinating, in Mehmet Ergen’s beautifully lit and perfectly cast production, to see those colours mixed on glass. But despite the meticulous detail of Turner’s recreated studio and the performances, it’s impossible to see the full picture.
Refreshingly, ‘The Painter’ doesn’t try to be a definitive portrait of the artist and his work. In the spirit of Turner, it’s a landscape more than a portrait (albeit a domestic one). It offers intense, muzzy glimpses of the obscure currents governing his emotional life (his deranged mother, his lonely pregnant mistress, his devoted dad).
Lenkiewicz’s dialogue is sharpened by a salty tang of the nineteenth-century city, with its snake-swallowers and pimps, often so cruel to vulnerable people like Turner’s model, Jenny, working as a prozzy to support her little boy. Lenkiewicz has a poetic feeling for suffering on the margins of society and Jenny (the phenomenally good Denise Gough) and Turner’s mad, vindictive mother (Amanda Boxer) are touching and authentic creations.
Toby Jones is riveting as Turner: it’s a complete piece of character acting, from the flashes of shyness, ambition and feeling which he extracts from the relatively few words provided to him, down to the practised flick with which he knots his apron. As he shyly begins an affair with the heavily pregnant widow next door (Niamh Cusack), sends his mother to the madhouse and reluctantly lectures on art, he is assisted in everything by his father (the excellent Jim Bywater, an unsentimental study in faithful love).
The impractical micro-length of the scenes and the haziness of the composition will offend the literal-minded: decades pass without acknowledgement and I didn’t realise Turner’s father had died in the last scene until I read the script. But superb acting helps subtle, affecting shapes emerge from the mist of time. An elusive but wonderfully apt tribute, to the English impressionist himself and the Arcola’s stylishly sketchy new building.