The Stage Company at the Brighton Festival Fringe

Press Release 20 April 2009      You'll also find us on:    Festival Previews

Silver Age Adieu by Keith Wait While the crowd riots, an enigmatic femme fatale meets a connoisseur. Cupid complains, but who wants the painting back?  Allegory, thriller or documentary?   Keith Wait’s new play, Silver Age Adieu, premiered in an abridged form at the Orange Tree, Richmond on 29th March, where it’s subject matter excited much controversy.  It opens at The Marlborough Little Theatre as part of the Brighton Fringe from 4th May and plays until 10th May.  It then goes on to the Edinburgh Fringe at The Merchants’ Hall from 5th to 16th August.   If you would like the opportunity to see this controversial work, tickets for Brighton £9.00, (£7.50 Concessions) are now selling on the Brighton Fringe box office: Book online now!

Premiered at Richmond's Orange Tree Silver Age Adieu, by Keith Wait, recently premiered at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Surrey in association with Arts Richmond.   Silver Age Adieu… really held the audience in a lot of ways… the thoughts that came out of the plot, out of the characters and out of the situation made a thought-provoking play that was full of interest …  Richard Morley, Richmond Arts Council.    Silver Age Adieu… was head and shoulders above the others.  I wanted more: the subject cries out for a larger canvas …  Barry Langley, Screenwriter   … a polished production and a real play that made an impact…  Norma Beresford-Cobbe

© National Gallery

Why is Silver Age Adieu Controversial? The controversy arises from Silver Age Adieu, because of the disputed provenance of Cranach’s Cupid Complaining to Venus, which hangs in the National Gallery in London.   The play speculates on the history of the painting, which disappeared between 1909 and 1963.  When it was sold by a wealthy Jewish collector from Frankfurt before the First World War, its buyer at a Berlin auction house was anonymous.  However, it was know to have been in a private collection in Switzerland between the Wars.   With the rise of Nazism, it was known to have been acquired by a top-ranking official.  However, this acquisition was probably a quite legal sale, although its price might have included a pledge to protect other works in the Swiss collection.  By a series of coercions and bribes, it gradually found its way up through the Nazi ranks, via Saukel, Himmler, Goebbels, and Göring to Hitler himself.   At the end of the Second World War, American soldiers looted many works of art.  In Bavaria the local US commander impounded paintings taken from galleries and private collections.  He was visited by his mistress, an extrovert journalist, who ended up talking him out of giving her Cranach’s Cupid Complaining to Venus.   When the painting turned up at a New York art auction in 1963, the National Gallery in London bought it for just under £34,000.  The Gallery was told it had come from descendants of the buyer at the 1909 Berlin auction.   It is an intriguing puzzle, and one from which many pieces still remain missing.   See what else you can find out about it here...

Brighton’s Own Missing Cranach Painting Brighton too has had a brush with the controversy that seems to surround Cranach’s works.    In November 1986, the 16th century painting John I ‘The Constant’ Elector of Saxony (c.1532) by the German master Lucas Cranach was wrenched from the wall during gallery opening hours at Brighton Museum. The painting was one of the numerous portraits that Cranach produced of figures at court around that time.   The painting entered the collection at Brighton by means of a donation in 1918. At the time of its theft in 1986, the painting was insured at only £5,000.  (Cranach’s painting, Venus and Cupid, sold at Christie’s for £2,360,000 in 2005).

Metropolitan Police                      Daily Mail

Inspiration  During one of the recurring violent protests against global capitalism, the playwright found himself ensconced in the National Gallery, while outside the protest developed into a riot.  The Old Master, The Close of the Silver Age, Lucas Cranach’s allegory on the fragility of civilisation, seemed immediately apposite.   His erotic masterpiece, Cupid Complaining to Venus, hung intriguingly alongside.   It’s witty message, that life’s pleasures must be paid for, came sharply into focus.  In 2009 these paintings have a clear resonance.    However, Cupid Complaining to Venus holds many dark secrets.  Its genesis was in the whirlwind of Luther’s reformation.  Then for 400 years it became a coveted jewel of sixteenth century art, until suddenly in 1909 in disappeared!    What happened to this work of genius for over half a century is known only through tantalising glimpses.  From Frankfurt to Berlin to Switzerland in the hands of wealthy Jewish collectors, it is then seen only in the background of historic meetings.  It was passed up an increasing hierarchy of Nazi leaders until eventually it was given as a birthday present, in the months before his downfall, to Adolf Hitler himself.   In the turmoil of victory, it was looted by American troops, given as a love-token to a general’s mistress, and disappeared into a cultural wilderness.    Cupid Complaining to Venus now hangs safely in London, or so we hope, for who knows who still might covet it or claim it as their own?   Embodied in the mysterious psyche of Ilona, a viola playing femme fatale, lies a deep secret, but what is the powerful allure of Cranach’s enigmatic magnum opus?

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