| The Old Masters | |
|---|---|
 Poster for original production | |
| Written by | Simon Gray |
| Date premiered | 4 June 2004 |
| Place premiered | Birmingham Repertory Theatre |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Drama |
| Setting | Villa I Tatti, near Florence, 1937 |
| Official site | |
The Old Masters is a play by Simon Gray about the art critic Bernard Berenson and the art dealer Joseph Duveen. It is set over one evening in Berenson's Italian home, Villa I Tatti, near Florence, in 1937. [1]
The play opens on the garden of Villa I Tatti near Florence. The famous art critic Bernard Berenson, referred to as ‘BB’, is fearful of the rising power of Mussolini, who he refers to as ‘the Duck’, and increasingly anxious about the state of his finances. His wife, Mary, is in poor health while he continues having an affair with his secretary, Nicky. Duveen's assistant Fowles arrives to deliver a copy of a painting, and to tell Berenson that Duveen would like him to reconsider his attribution of a painting, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Berenson has already declared it to be by Titian, but Duveen would like him to change his mind and attribute it to Giorgione, and so increase its value considerably. Duveen is keen to sell the painting to the art collector, Mellon. Other art critics have already decided it is a Giorgione, but Berenson, whose reputation is pre-eminent, refuses to change his mind. Fowles leaves. Later that evening Duveen arrives, unannounced, to convince Berenson to change his mind in person. From there the intense and turbulent nature of their long working relationship unfolds.
The Old Master was first performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England on 4 June 2004, before moving to the Comedy Theatre, London, from 1 July 2004. It was directed by Harold Pinter with the following cast:
The Daily Telegraph wrote "In the final analysis, the piece is less illuminating about art, less touching in its account of human love, than one might have hoped"; [2] The Guardian concluded "the play belongs to its two male leads and when they are on stage you forgive Gray's elegant meanderings"; [3] Variety wrote "the old masters involved in “The Old Masters” — from Gray to director Harold Pinter, the two marking their ninth collaboration, and on to co-star Edward Fox — aren’t in sustainedly peak form"; [4] whereas The Independent called it "shrewd, beautifully articulated drama... The Old Masters is authentically vintage Gray." [5]
In June 2010 a US production of the play was announced, starring Brian Murray and Sam Waterston. It was due to run at the Long Wharf Theatre from 19 January to 13 February 2011, before moving to New York. [6]
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
Giorgione was an Italian painter of the Venetian school during the High Renaissance, who died in his thirties. He is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are firmly attributed to him. The uncertainty surrounding the identity and meaning of his work has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European art.
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969.
Bernard Berenson was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. His book The Drawings of the Florentine Painters was an international success. His wife Mary is thought to have had a large hand in some of the writings.
Simon James Holliday Gray was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.
La Belle Ferronnière is a portrait of a lady, usually attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, in the Louvre. It is also known as Portrait of an Unknown Woman. The painting's title, applied as early as the seventeenth century, identifying the sitter as the wife or daughter of an ironmonger, was said to be discreetly alluding to a reputed mistress of Francis I of France, married to a certain Le Ferron. Later she was identified as Lucretia Crivelli, a married lady-in-waiting to Duchess Beatrice of Milan, who became another of the Duke's mistresses.
Joseph Duveen, 1st Baron Duveen, known as Sir Joseph Duveen, Bt., between 1927 and 1933, was a British art dealer who was considered one of the most influential art dealers of all time.
For the village near Livorno, see Sassetta, Tuscany
Butley is a play by Simon Gray set in the office of an English lecturer at a university in London, England. The title character, a T. S. Eliot scholar, is an alcoholic who loses his wife and his close friend and colleague – and possibly male lover – on the same day. The action of the dark comedy takes place over several hours on the same day during which he bullies students, friends and colleagues while falling apart at the seams. The play won the 1971 Evening Standard Award for Best Play.
Quartermaine's Terms is a play by Simon Gray which won The Cheltenham Prize in 1982.
The Adoration of the Shepherds, sometimes still known as the Allendale Nativity, after a former owner, is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione, completed in about 1505 to 1510. The attribution is now usual, although not universal; the usual other view is that it is an early Titian. It is certainly a Venetian painting of that period. It is displayed in the National Gallery of Art of Washington, D.C., United States.
Don Marcello Massarenti, a Vatican official who helped Pope Pius IX escape from Rome at the time of the Roman republican uprising of 1849, rose to become Almoner of the Pope. In his official position he traveled extensively and amassed a collection of Italian paintings and Roman antiquities especially during the years following the Unification of Italy, when the suppression of many monastic communities and the displacement of many aristocrats from hereditary positions brought a great number of works of art onto the market in Italy, both privately and publicly. He received an honorary knighthood from Franz Josef of Austria and was decorated with the Order of the Red Eagle of Prussia.
Reginald Gray was an Irish portrait artist. He studied at The National College of Art (1953) and then moved to London, becoming part of the School of London led by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In 1960, he painted a portrait of Bacon which now hangs in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. He subsequently painted portraits from life of writers, musicians and artists such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Brendan Behan, Garech Browne, Derry O'Sullivan, Alfred Schnittke, Ted Hughes, Rupert Everett and Yves Saint Laurent. In 1993 Gray had a retrospective exhibition at UNESCO Paris and in 2006, his portrait "The White Blouse" won the Sandro Botticelli Prize in Florence, Italy.
Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies is a center for advanced research in the humanities located in Florence, Italy, and belongs to Harvard University. It houses a collection of Italian primitives, and of Chinese and Islamic art, as well as a research library of 140,000 volumes and a collection of 250,000 photographs. It is the site of Italian and English gardens. Villa I Tatti is located on an estate of olive groves, vineyards, and gardens on the border of Florence, Fiesole and Settignano.
The Common Pursuit is a play by Simon Gray which follows the lives of six characters who first meet as undergraduates at Cambridge University when they are involved in setting up a literary magazine called The Common Pursuit. The title is an allusion to F. R. Leavis's 1952 collection of essays Scrutiny: The Common Pursuit.
Sir Michael Victor Codron is a British theatre producer, known for his productions of the early work of Harold Pinter, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard. He has been honoured with a Laurence Olivier Award for Lifetime Achievement, and owns the Aldwych Theatre in the West End, London.
Roger Jenkins is a British theatre and television director who directed multiple British television productions from the mid-1950s until the 1980s as well as directing, producing, and filming numerous stage plays.
Frank Wright was an American painter, professor of art for many years at George Washington University, and sixth-generation Washingtonian.
Maud [Alice Wilson] Cruttwell was an English artist, art historian, writer and biographer. Her books on Italian Renaissance artists were pioneering examples of the analytical critical style of Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson.
Luisa Vertova was an Italian art historian. Her research work mostly focused on Renaissance Italian painters such as Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Paolo Veronese, Titian, Botticelli and Caravaggio. In addition she undertook numerous projects as editor of several editions of her mentor Bernard Berenson's and her husband Benedict Nicolson's writings.