Theater Royal Drury Lane

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In situ images by Philip Vile

In late 2019, Andrew Lloyd Webber approached Maria, requesting she create 8 large-scale paintings as a permanent site-specific installation for his newly refurbished Theater Royal Drury Lane. The thematic prompt, arrived at in her New York studio, was this: “Maria, let’s do Shakespeare. I’d like you to make this work dangerous and apocalyptic, with your soul on the line.”

A one-of-a-kind commission, the works are accessible to the public daily, from morning to evening, at the Theater Royal Drury Lane (Catherine St, London WC2B 5JF ), situated in the heart of London’s Covent Garden.

Select recent press: The Art Newspaper Surface Mag Country and Town House Barron’s Women’s Wear Daily

MARIA’S NOTES ON THE WORK:

Samuel Johnson praised Shakespeare for offering us a “map of life” through a collection of plays whose characters display “the genuine progeny of common humanity.” Fueled by this same reverence, Johnson’s friend and pupil, the great actor David Garrick, would later revive Shakespeare’s plays through his iconic performances at Drury Lane, transforming it into London’s most flourishing theater.

It’s this deep dive into the human condition and psyche—into the big themes of life— that still captures us centuries later. The plays are as much a study into complex individuality, love, and humor, as they are a study into madness—turbulent, dark, redemptive, absurd, comedic, ecstatic. Always beautiful.

We recognize Shakespeare’s archetypes in our daily life, yet the plays remain open-ended, elliptical, leaving us with more questions than answers. These paintings are a conversation with Shakespeare, not an illustration. Like a portrait of the play at large, they are intuitive reflections of my close reading of the texts. I’m focusing on the general emotional thrust of each play as I feel it, using the human body and gesture as vehicles for empathy. Placing particular emphasis on the hands, they aim to communicate as directly as would a pair of eyes.

HAMLET

Hamlet enters stage right, and exits stage left. Always of two minds, he appears in my painting twice. ‘To be, or not to be,’ he asks, as he walks from being, through the Ovidian water Ophelia drowns in, into non- being. The whole picture is colored by ‘the pale cast of thought,’ as Ophelia dissolves in that ‘quintessence of dust.’ If truth is incarnated in Hamlet through his intelligence (as Harold Bloom notes), it is incarnated in Ophelia through feeling. They are present together, foils for each other’s capacities, yet the distance between them is insurmountable.

We see ourselves in Hamlet. That is the metastructure of the play. So much of Shakespeare operates like a Rorschach test as we come to see who we are through the reading of the work. The lateral symmetry of this image implies that famous blot.

OTHELLO

“I'll pour this pestilence into his ear:
That she repeals him for her body's lust;
And by how much she strives to do him good, She shall undo her credit with the Moor.

So will I turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all”

Othello. Act II, Scene 3. Iago

My Othello is a Baroque composition with an eerie contemporary light. Iago’s words flow through Othello’s ear, into his mind, through his hands, and into Desdemona. Othello compares the force of his rage with the natural power of a sea, so what flows from his hands follows the leitmotif of water as a sign of the subconscious, and blends with Desdemona’s hair, itself a visual clue of “her own goodness,” “the net that shall enmesh them all.” A strong, diagonal sweep in the composition lands the eye at Desdemona’s hand, either lifeless or sleeping, we can’t yet know.

KING LEAR

“Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, The gods themselves throw incense.”

King Lear. Act V, Scene 3. Lear

Lear is a painful play. Yet it reveals the possibility of forgiveness and redemption in the face of our flawed nature. The life-affirming is present against the background of the catastrophic.

Reason and madness are confused in what again is the leitmotif of water, the storm, which is the main climatic event of the play.
An array of interpretations can apply to the many hands in this composition— the three daughters, good and evil, etc. I focused on the storm, on the feeling of Lear’s “howl,” and the notion of a fallen king leaving a power vacuum in his wake. The composition is dystopian and devotional, leveraging the shape of two crosses, one pulling Cordelia up, and the other pulling Lear down, as they part in the middle. The exact center of the painting is Cordelia’s hand, a symbol of their love and reconciliation, however brief.

MACBETH

...they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air,
into which they vanished.

Macbeth. Act I, Scene 5. Lady Macbeth

I focus entirely on Lady Macbeth in this painting. Even the three witches of her “proleptic imagination” (as Bloom calls it) are seen here as versions of her own psyche. Both terrified and enthralled by her vision of power, she moves through the play having scrambled prediction, present, and future. Time itself takes

on a fantastical, hallucinatory quality in this play, echoing “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...” In the painting, her right hand seems to conjure another world from the dark waters of her subconscious in a mystical act of recalling the future, at once empowered and betrayed by her own imagination.

AS YOU LIKE IT

[to PHEBE] I would love you if I could.--
To-morrow meet me all together.--
[to PHEBE] I will marry you if ever I marry woman, and I'll be married to-morrow:--
[to ORLANDO] I will satisfy you if ever I satisfied man, and you shall be married to-morrow:--
[to SILVIUS] I will content you if what pleases you contents you, and you shall be married to-morrow. [to ORLANDO] As you love Rosalind, meet.
[to SILVIUS] As you love Phebe, meet;--
and as I love no woman, I'll meet.--So, fare you well; I have
left you commands.

As You Like It. Act V, Scene 2. Rosalind

Love triangles, identity confusion, androgyny and gender bending are the highlights of this pastoral satire. Like Hamlet, Rosalind meets the viewer’s eyes directly in my composition. She is one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated heroines, commanding the most lines (like Hamlet), and exhibiting exceptional wit and intelligence. Orlando reaches for her reflection in the water (again, a gesture to the subconscious), whilst the true Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, sits just a hair’s breadth away, their fingers just about to touch. The configuration of the hands falls on the backdrop of various fabrics, all with their own erotic innuendo. (What would Shakespeare be without those?) Is it Celia or Phebe who moves longingly toward Rosalind? I leave it open- ended, much like the hand pulling Rosalind from the left.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act V, Scene 1. Theseus

Entering into the green forest indicates entry into dream state, transcendent of logic and convention. Elizabethan’s saw imagination as dark and treacherous, unruly and dangerous. Wandering through enchanted fairyland, our heroes are also lost in the void of the subconscious. Time, space, affections, and destinies are scrambled as they chase after each other in an attempt to recapture their own identities, and love.

This is the most surreal painting of the series. Puck’s hand appears on the top right, pouring out magical liquid in the form of iridescent bubbles, or water droplets, in which fantasy worlds appear. In the main bubble, Titania, Oberon, Bottom, and others meet in the green forest.

ROMEO AND JULIET

But to be frank, and give it thee again. And yet I wish but for the thing I have: My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.

Romeo and Juliet. Act II, Scene 2. Juliet

No more deeply are love and death intertwined in Shakespeare’s works than in Romeo and Juliet. I’ve chosen to interpret this play through the intensity and depth of Juliet’s passion. She

possesses a capacity for love remarkable even within the canon. So the pain of her loss is equally profound.
The drink Romeo and Juliet use to sleep and their tears are embodied in the tall white column, a waterfall of paint, that culminates at the bottom of the canvas with an abstracted version of the iconic Verona staircase. Adjacent are the dissolving clothing they leave behind.

As always, there are multiple interpretations for the hands that reach towards Romeo from the top and bottom of the composition. In my preliminary drawings, my fingers always end up stained with graphite or charcoal. Perhaps here for them it’s the mark of destiny.

THE TEMPEST

I flamed amazement
The Tempest. Act I. Scene 2. Ariel

Drury Lane has a unique history of resurrection from fires. This, along with Ariel's words, color the Tempest: "I flamed amazement," says the spirit. "Sometimes I’d divide, and burn in many places." "...I flashed about faster than lightning. The fire and deafening cracks seemed to overwhelm even the god of the sea himself..." (Act I, Scene 2. Ariel)

The painting is ablaze with a fiery storm and musical dream logic. Prospero appears here like a conductor (his wand faintly visible), lost in the flow of his music and its magical storm; yet he is also overtaken and subsumed by its power. Prospero wields his magic as a tool for power, yet must break his staff, drown his books, and relinquish control of these forces to become human again.

The painting formally pays homage to Goya’s Colossus.