Making a Drama out of a Painting

Each term at creative cafe we have a new theme. One way to come up with ideas for this is by using prompts to inspire small group sketches. As we sat in a circle at our first session, Hayley asked us each what was our favourite artist or artwork. She then presented us with a selection of art prints spread around the room. We each gravitated towards one or more painting and chatted in groups about how they  might inspire a drama piece.  I was drawn towards Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le Déjeuner des Canotiers) by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir,  but when the others drifted away to different paintings, Jamie and I decided to join up with  new member Sam who was standing alone next to ‘American Gothic’(1930),  a painting by Grant Wood depicting a stern looking couple in front of a Rural Gothic style house. We were discussing various ideas when, out of the blue, Sam spoke to me in French. This prompted me to suggest that we reconsider the Renoir painting.

Luncheon of the Boating Party’ (1881) depicts a group of Renoir’s friends including his future wife Aline Charigot, on the balcony of a restaurant by the river Seine. Sam said he would like to be called Thierry Henry and we asked Dora to play Aline. When I found out that Thierry Henry was considered a great striker, I saw an opportunity for a word play about the French reputation for going on strike.

The Magic of Connections

We decided to set our play in  1889, the centenary of the Revolution and the date the Eiffel Tower was completed.  I then found out that ‘l’Exposition Universelle’, took place in Paris between May and October 1889, which  added another dimension to our narrative.  A World Fair of fantastic proportions, it boasted not only  the tallest structure in the world, but huge galleries presenting the latest technology and buildings and exhibits from all over the world including a whole street shipped in from Cairo.  It attracted over 32 million visitors (more than the population of England at the time).

As I found out more about the paintings, a golden web of connections emerged, starting with the date we had chosen for our play.  In June 1889, a little known artist painted a scene from his window in an mental asylum in the south of France. It was to become one of the most famous paintings in the world. The artist was Vincent Van Gogh, and his painting The Starry Night was the inspiration for another of our plays featuring an astronaut, an alien and an exploding star.

Next to The Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is another of our paintings, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), an oil on canvas by naïve artist Henri Rousseau.

The painting is believed to be based on Rousseau’s observations of animals at the Jardin des Plantes and of reconstructed colonial villages at the 1889 Exposition Universelle/World Fair in Paris.  The group who chose this painting, did a play about a couple crossing a desert and meeting a lion who watches over the wife when the husband abandons her. This piece inspired our theme of trust and betrayal.

Our fourth play by John and Jotie, is based on Nighthawks by the American artist Edward Hopper, the only painting that wasn’t painted in 19th Century France.  Apart from the word ‘night’ in the title, which provides a tenuous link to the Van Gogh, it seems at first to be unconnected to the others; but take a look at this account based on the diary of Edward’s wife Jo:

‘Upon completing Nighthawks in the late winter of 1941–42, Hopper placed it on display at Rehn’s, in Chicago, the gallery at which his paintings were normally placed for sale. It remained there for about a month. On St. Patrick’s Day, Edward and Jo Hopper attended the opening of an exhibit of the paintings of Henri Rousseau at New York’s Museum of Modern Art  which had been organized by Daniel Catton Rich, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art’s director spoke enthusiastically of Gas, which Hopper had painted a year earlier, and Jo told him he just had to go to Rehn’s to see Nighthawks. In the event, it was Rich who went, pronounced Nighthawks ‘fine as a [Winslow] Homer’, and soon arranged its purchase for Chicago.’

The painting reminded John of a fish tank, so the group created a play  about a gangster fish bar, with Jotie playing the wonderfully sinister ‘Cod Mother’!  The fact that it depicts a cafe of sorts connects it to our first painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party,  thus completing the web of connections.