Drawing: Carly Bawden in McQueen

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

carly b

Carly Bawden is starring as Dahlia in the West End transfer of McQueen at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, replacing Dianna Agron who played the role during the plays sell-out premiere season at the St James Theatre earlier this year. Written by James Phillips and directed by John Caird, It is a revelationary insight into the imagination of Lee “Alexander’ McQueen, one of British fashion’s most notorious and brilliant artists. Dahlia is based on a 2008 quote by the late designer. “I’ve got a 600 year-old elm tree in my garden. I made up a story: a girl lives in it and comes out of the darkness to meet a prince and becomes a queen.” In the play Lee discovers Dahlia, a strange and beautiful girl lurking in his house. She has been watching him from a tree for the past 11 nights. Instead of calling the police, he takes her on a wild one-night tour of London, believing she might know him better than he knows himself. Dahlia is his other self.

I drew this sketch of Carly as Dahlia wearing the centrepiece’golden feather coat’. It’s my favourite because of what it represents she said in a recent interview. ‘It’s quite a striking piece.He (McQueen) was always attracted to misogyny and things like that when all he really wanted to do was protect women…he said his clothes were like armour.The golden coat provides this striking, beautiful armour.”

Carly played Squeaky Fromme opposite Catherine Tate in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Assassins at The Menier Chocolate Factory last year. I met her on the final night and she signed a Squeaky sketch for me. When we caught up again, at the Haymarket stage door after Saturday’s matinee, I asked her to graph this Dahlia drawing, said gasped, ‘Oh It’s YOU!”…but in a ‘nice way’-not a ‘you’re something on my shoe’ sorta way and was once again very complimentary about the rendering.

Drawing: Ricardo Chavira and Flor De Liz Perez in The Motherf**ker With The Hat

Posted on September 5, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

motherfucker in hat

It would be fair to say that the title of this play caught my attention. The Motherfucker with the Hat is sometimes censored as The Motherf**ker with the Hat and is a play by Pulitzer Prize winning Puerto Rican / American playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis which premiered at Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Thetare in April 2011. Earning six Tony nominations, it was described as a “high octane verbal cage match about love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery”.

In June this year it received its UK premiere on the Lyttelton stage at the National Theatre, directed by Indhu Rubasingham.

In her four star Guardian review, Susannah Clap commented on “The National’s irritating decision to use asterisks,”as, “both coy and preening on their marketing material”. Stephen Collins continued this theme on the BritishTheatre.com site,”Given the number of times the word “motherfucker is bandied about, along with other sundry expletives, this misplaced sense of propriety is frankly embarrassing. It’s as if The National Theatre is slightly horrified by its choice”. He noted that the play was able to appear on Broadway billboards without asterisks.

Ricardo Chavira (from TVs Desperate Housewives plays former drug dealer Jackie who is on parole and living clean and sober. Flor De Liz Perez (now that’s a moniker to equal the play’s title) is his girlfriend Veronica who “still uses and boozes”. Jackie arrives at Veronica’s cramped Times Square studio apartment “full of good intentions and pent up testosterone”. As they’re jumping into bed he notices a hat… not his hat… so he accuse’s her of cheating which triggers a New York run around.

“Chavira is in bravura form and really squeezes every bit of interest out of his character and the situations. It’s tough, brutal, brooding at its best,” writes Collins. Flor De Liz Perez is, “sexy, vicious, bad tempered foul mouthed and effortlessly libidinous,” as the girl shared by Jackie and the titular hat wearer.

“She spits out offensive abuse with the same rigorous detachment that Julie Andrews enunciates consonants in The Sound of Music. It’s a full throttle performance”.

The National only has one stage door, but a myriad of exits and entrances, so I usually leave the sketch and hope it will be passed on to the respective talent. The productions are also in repertory which means that they are not performed everyday, so you have to plan your drop off carefully. I left this sketch early in the run when it was on stage over a few days in succession.

When nothing came back I figured I had missed the boat. Then yesterday two weeks after the final performance, this appeared in the mail.

Drawing: Genevieve O’Reilly in Splendour

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Genevieve O'Reilly

Irish-born, Australian-raised, London-based actress Genevieve O’Reilly is currently playing a Western photojournalist in Abi Morgan’s tense and gripping play Splendour at the Donmar Warehouse. She is waiting in a room to take the photo of a dictator in a fictional country with his wife, her best friend and an interpreter. All four women harbour secrets. All four are in danger and the dictator is late…very late.

I met Genevieve in late 2010 at the then Comedy Theatre, (now Harold Pinter) when she was in Sebastian Faulk’s stage version of his novel Birdsong with Ben Barnes. They both signed sketches for me. When I met her a couple of weeks ago at the Donmar to get this drawing graphed, she remembered me and said she still has the copy of the Birdsong one I gave both her and Ben.

Drawing: Stacy Lewis

Posted on September 3, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Golf clubs to golfers are kind of like pens to graphers…reasonably essential. Former World Number 1 and two-time major winner, American golfer Stacy Lewis arrived in Scotland in July for this years British Women’s Open Championship minus her clubs. British Airways had misplaced them…then told her it would take 24 hours to find…then she and her caddie had to make the 300-plus mile trek to London to collect them….then they got a flat tyre. In all of this however the 30 year-old star of the LPGA and currently third in the rankings, still had the good-nature and more importantly a pen to sign this sketch for me.

Drawing: Ellie Bamber

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

ellie bamber

Eighteen year-old Ellie Bamber is amongst the latest group of rising stars in the British stage and screen scene. Her angelic face came in handy for her latest theatre role as the 14 year-old Dinah Lord in Maria Friedman’s ‘effervescent’ revival of Cole Porter’s High Society at The Old Vic. Promoting her role, which she was attracted to because it was “quite cheeky and good fun,” Ellie appeared in a number of print media publications, one of which I was flicking through on the tube. A photo accompanied it, which I thought would be cool to draw…so i did, then dropped it into the theatre for her to sign…which she did.

Drawing: Jessica Brown Findlay in Oresteia

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Jessica Brown Findlay

Oresteia premiered at the Dionysia Festival in Athens in 458 BC. Now it’s been called one of “the year’s theatrical sensations” by The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins…well Robert Ickes’ contemporary re-working of the Aeschylus’ trilogy of Ancient Greek tragedies, which had its summer season at London’s small Almeida Theatre has been given that accolade, because it has now deservedly transferred to the West End. In the director’s own words, “it’s the mother of the violent family drama…and feels increasingly like the precursor of The Sopranos.” Playing the Trafalgar Studios for a limited season until November, the story revolves around the usual Greek family drama tragedy themes, murder, revenge and retribution. The plot sees the titular character Orestes and his sister Electra (or Elektra as some care to spell it ), plotting revenge against their mother and stepfather for the murder of their father. Sound familiar? After a short, but acclaimed screen career, twenty-five year-old British actress Jessica Brown Findlay made her stage debut as the ‘gutsy’ sis.

I read in all her recent interviews that Jessica doesn’t like to be referred to as a Downton Abbey actress, so I won’t and I didn’t mention it when she signed this Electra sketch for me at the Trafalgar’s stage door on Saturday. Oh and as a postscript, the play won first prize in the Dionysia Festival in Athens way back in 458 BC, and this production looks like it might garner some awards of it’s own.