Stanley

About the show

The play explores the complicated life of British painter Stanley Spencer, who was played by Antony Sher in the play's London and Broadway debuts. Spencer was a twentieth-century painter whose work attempted to combine the sexual with the divine in contemporary English settings. His paintings frequently showed biblical scenes taking place in ordinary English villages, particularly Cookham, and often depicted or used figures inspired by his friends, relatives and lovers. Spencer married two different women; he left his first wife, Hilda Carline, an artist who put her ambition aside to make a home for him, to marry Patricia Preece, a defiantly unconventional lesbian who made her reputation as an artist by passing off the works of her lover, Dorothy Hepworth, as her own, and who was incapable of loving him. Much of the play revolves around his passionate attachment to both women.