Life drawing

Sue MacLaine is possibly the only actor whose pre-show ritual involves removing her clothes and running around the performance space completely naked.

It is hard to equate this ritual with the petite, greying, softly spoken woman who sits across from me in the Coach & Horses in London’s Soho. But then, as Still Life sets out to demonstrate, the image a person presents to others isn’t always all there is to know.

The reason for MacLaine’s ritual is to make herself feel comfortable naked, because she spends most of the show being exactly that. Written and performed by MacLaine, Still Life sees her play Henrietta Moraes, a life model who was muse to artists including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in the 1950s and 60s. Described in a Guardian obituary as “foul-mouthed, amoral, a thief, a violent drunkard and a drug addict; yet she was witty, wonderfully warm and lovable,” Moraes’s eccentric life as one of the Soho set provides MacLaine with plenty of stories to tell throughout the 70 minute piece, interspersing these fragments of a life with silent poses recreated from the Freud and Bacon works Moraes posed for.

But what makes this different from any other biographical play is that the show is staged not in a traditional theatre space but in a studio, and the audience is encouraged to draw MacLaine as Moraes, as though in a life drawing class.

Having performed Still Life in her hometown of Brighton last year and at London's National Portrait Gallery in spring 2012, MacLaine has seen the various responses this elicits. Some take to the task with gusto, she says, others are more tentative, while some choose not to draw at all or to write instead. By the end of the Brighton run over 600 drawings donated by audience members were displayed at the venue. Some were brilliant, says MacLaine, while some verged on stick figures, but the display gave other people confidence to give it a go.

So is this theatre or life drawing? Under the gaze of her audience, MacLaine sees how it segues between the two. “There is this change in the gaze, which is part of what the piece is about,” she says. “How do we look at somebody, how do we look at a life, how do you see a person beyond what they might be representing to you?” When she’s silent, in pose, the audience is concentrating with “that objective feeling of looking and drawing and trying to get the form.” But when MacLaine tells Moraes’s story, “people’s gaze has to change... there’s a different sort of acuity, of listening and looking, that has to happen.”

And as Moraes’s life story progresses to its sad conclusion—in 1999 she died, aged 67, of cirrhosis of the liver—the audience’s enthusiasm for drawing slows. “There’s something interesting about how much people can keep drawing... the construct that she [Moraes] has started at the beginning of the piece doesn’t last.”

It’s that construct—the hedonistic, self-centred artists’ muse—that drew MacLaine to Moraes’s autobiography. In particular, it was that Guardian obituary’s description of her profession as ‘bohemian.' “I have this part of my character which is very obliged and quite Protestant work ethic,” says MacLaine, “and she seemed to have a life that was tethered to nothing, actually. So her untetheredness was really exciting to me.”

Unlike Moraes, MacLaine has a day job – as a Sign Language Interpreter – to support her work as a writer and performer. But it’s clear that she, a little wistfully perhaps, admires the muse’s blatant disregard for the sensible option. But was that carefree, bohemian 1950s lifestyle all it seemed? “It’s gone,” MacLaine says, gesturing around the shabby boozer that the Coach & Horses, the old haunting ground of the Soho set—has become. Even Moraes’s portrait, which once adorned a wall of the pub, has been removed. “I’m aware that when I look back on it and look at the photos of it, it looks wonderful. But she may have been sitting there thinking, ‘bloody hell I haven’t got any money.’ It’s one of the things that as a writer I’m really interested in, about how do we try and remain congruent about our lives.”

Whether audiences get all this out of Still Life, or simply enjoy trying their hand at life drawing, the show certainly promises a collective experience unlike any other at the Fringe. “Drawing is the glue of the piece,” says MacLaine, “and there’s a very warm feeling in the audience because they have all been through the same experience. People are really concentrating and there’s a sense at the end of the show that everyone comes up for air.”