How do we respond to much-loved works of art when the behaviour of the artist comes into question? And can we truly enjoy artworks by people who have committed crimes or been abusive to colleagues and family members?

Where do we draw the line between the art and the artist? And do we do a dis-service to the other creatives who collaborate on music and film projects by rejecting the work?

In this deep-dive discussion playwright and director Mary Swan hosts an important and often surprising inquiry into how we respond when culture and morality collide.

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“I have a friend who has a Rolf Harris painting... It’s a really great painting, and they bought it as an investment.. And then it all came out about his past and the imprisonment and stuff, and she’s like, ‘Well, what do we do with it now?’”

— Saul Jaffe

Mary's guests for this episode are

Mary Rose, who has performed on Broadway alongside Kristin Scott Thomas in a Royal Court production of The Seagull, as well as an acclaimed one-woman show, 12.10.15 at the Edinburgh Festival.

Mary plays artist Catherine Shaw in Proteus Theatre's stage production, Indestructible.

Paul Huntley-Thomas appears in the Disney+ Marvel mini-series Secret Invasion and the 2DF Studios feature Lost Women Spies.

Paul plays art collector Robin in Proteus Theatre's stage production, Indestructible.

Saul Jaffe is an actor, dramaturg and creative consultant. He has worked for Shakespeare's Globe and performed at the National Theatre, as well as his one-man show Merrick, The Elephant Man, which appeared in the Brits Off Broadway festival in 2009.

Saul is the dramaturg for Proteus Theatre's stage production, Indestructible.

“If you think about modern celebrities... no publicity is bad publicity. Where do you draw the line? Because there would be a lot of building those brands. The behaviour is notorious... and that can make someone really exciting.”

— Mary Rose

Chapters

1:52 The challenge of enjoying Woody Allen's movies

3:19 Re-assessing the music of Michael Jackson

4:27 Navigating the fog of cases like Johnny Depp

4:57 Pablo Picasso's relationships with women

7:03 Owning a Rolf Harris painting

9:03 Roald Dahl's language and anti-semitism

15:28 Feeding the PR machine with bad behaviour

17:37 Female artists who deserve more exposure

Mary Swan 0:05
Hi. Thanks for joining us for Indestructible for the podcast connected to the Protest theatre show. I'm Mary Swan, artistic director of Proteus, and my guests for this edition. Mary Rose, Actor playing Catherine Shaw in the show Indestructible Soldier who's dramaturg for the show. And on it, Thomas, who is playing Robin and other roles in the show. All three are joining me today to ask the question, Can we ever truly separate the art from the artist? And do we have to? We'll chat about the complexities of this issue and ask when we can still enjoy an artist's work despite their behavior and when we have to reject it. Some of the themes in Indestructible relate to this conversation. We'll try and avoid any spoilers if you haven't seen the show yet. But this relates to a lot of the conversations we were having when we were making the show and devising the show in the first place. So hello, Welcome along. Thank you.
My first question really is who's been the most disappointing to discover They were problematic. So there's some people that you're really close to in terms of their art and their artwork. For me, it was Woody Allen that I still struggle with and constantly have arguments with my daughters around because I really want them to enjoy and see his work. And I, I'm not willing to give up some of those movies because they're so meaningful for me. But there's no doubt there's some very disappointing stuff going on there. But again, it's very difficult because he's one of those people for whom it's not cut and dried. Did all these things really happen? Blah, blah, blah. But it's still a really tough one. Hmm. Paul, What? Is there anyone that springs to mind for you?
Paul Huntley-Thomas 1:52
Well, definitely Woody Allen. Yeah. So I'm a huge William fan, and I still watch a lot of the films and still love them. And but if you talk about film directors, you could talk about Polanski as well. Are you allowed to watch the films up to a certain point and then no further? How much does what they've done influenced the work before they were accused before? Whatever it is that has happened, happens. Supported Polanski? Definitely. Woody Allen. I love Woody Allen. I mean, Annie Hall is probably one of my top ten favorite films, and I still have to watch them.
Mary Swan 2:25
Someone like Woody Allen is a collaborative artist. I mean, I know his writer director. It really is his work. But yes, the main reason that Annie Hall works so well is because of Diane Keaton. So you kind of think something really sad about the fact that, yes, you're not getting those performances.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 2:40
And especially with Woody Allen's, he works with a company of actors and you see a lot of the same actors appear in a lot of his films and a lot of the same DOP. He's an assistant directors and that sort of thing as well. What happens to their careers when somebody is canceled? What happens to repeat fees for actors? If you take a band like the Lost Profits, where Ian Watkins was convicted of horrible crimes, what happens to the rest of the band who aren't involved in that? What happens to their ongoing financial concerns and worries.
Mary Swan 3:12
Is a tricky one. So what's who's been disappointing for you to find out? They're not who you thought they were?
Saul Jaffe 3:19
I don't know. I mean, for me is probably really Michael Jackson. Roger Waters, somebody told me recently and I kind of went his politics have gone into a very strange place. And again, Pink Floyd, dare I say for a moment, my life was a band I listen to a lot. But I think genuinely, the one that comes up is Michael Jackson on the radio. I just hear his songs more and more at the moment, and what I find happening is going, That's a great tune, brings back so many memories, places me in so many different places. But I'm also thinking, I know now the accusations attached to his story. So that song brings up all that wealth of stuff I'm into in the song, but at the same time I'm kind of going, Can I, can I as much?
Mary Swan 4:01
Yeah, well, that's the thing, isn't it? When do we give ourselves permission? This is the same thing that a lot of people are going through with Morrissey's. But I think there's a successful separation between Morrissey and the Smiths so that the Smiths are unproblematic. Morrissey solo work is proving very difficult. A lot of people I know very well who are struggling with that. Mary, Is there anyone for you? They might not be. You might be absolutely gleefully, I think anyone letting you down.
Mary Rose 4:27
Johnny Depp It's really difficult with people like Johnny Depp because things get thrown out of court and then you're like, I've gone along with this whole narrative and how much of that is true and you grow to love the characters that these actors play. And it's very hard to separate that from the actual person who of course, you'll never know unless you work with him directly. Michael Jackson's similar thing grew up with that music full of those memories. I find it quite.
Mary Swan 4:57
Interesting, though, isn't it? Because there's a question about is it better? Should we bring back a sort of form of the Hays Code, the old school Hollywood idea, where actually performers for the Hollywood studios were so managed their private lives so hidden that nothing was ever going to come out so there was never this kind of question. We talks a lot when we were making the show, didn't we, about Picasso? And we were saying that even though Francoise Ito had published her book, it's come back now because of Hannah Gadsby's conversation about him in the Net and then her exhibition, It's Pablo Matic, the Brooklyn Museum, which is just great. But I have to admit I knew about Francoise Ito's book, but I wasn't as aware of Picasso's misogyny. Paul, were you before?
Paul Huntley-Thomas 5:43
Yeah, I think I was quoted in the play. The two of his lovers committed suicide. Now one of them committed suicide after he died. She obviously felt something for him. I'm not defending him. I'm not defending misogyny at all. But it's it's always hard to view a relationship from the outside. I think you never know really what is going on. But coming back to what you were saying earlier, when we do talk about people who are problematic, who decides who is problematic, Do we then bring in a lord chancellor who will probably be the Oxbridge white male who then decides what is okay for the rest of us to to listen to the view? And then that has hugely fundamental problems about who decides how you decide what the parameters are. That just makes everybody's life far worse than actually making individual decisions on your own.
Mary Swan 6:38
Yeah. Are we happy to be managed in such a way in terms of what's right and what's wrong? But the flipside of that, what worries me a little bit is we have to be able to like the work of an artist, but also acknowledge and talk about their problematic status. But is there a moment, do we think, where actually you honestly cannot do that? Is there anyone saw for you that you could not possibly engage with now as an artist?
Saul Jaffe 7:03
Because it's so difficult, if I'm honest. So for example, I have a friend who has a Rolf Harris painting and it's beautiful. It's a really great painting, and they bought it as an investment because they thought, Wow, we don't collect art, but this is fantastic and is by an artist that people know. And then it all came out about his past and the imprisonment and stuff, and she's like, Well, what do we do with it now? Do we keep it on display and have it as a talking point for this very reason? Say, should we take it down? We have kids. I don't want the association with his behaviour or do we keep it in view because it's a painting and it's something that we like and it serves as a talking point. It's incredibly difficult. You talk about Hollywood of the 1930s and think it's just built on salacious gossip that what kept it going and for our generation was like, wow. And if people behaved generally as we think they did back then, half of them would be cancelled or films would never be looked at again. So I'm sure I'll never answer this question adequately.
Mary Rose 8:08
Something we have been talking about around the place is the red line that we draw and how, for me as a woman now, my perspective on what's okay in terms of behaviour is very different to how I might have perceived it in my twenties. And your daughter who's in her twenties. There are things that she would see as completely unacceptable. So I so I have to mention Jimmy Savile, and I remember watching that as a kid, thinking nothing other than this is quite a magical experience. Now look back on it or this or the context set, but very, very creepy individual. How how did I not see that? I
would a young person coming across some of the Jimmy Saville footage now not knowing his story, how would they perceive it?
Mary Swan 9:03
That is something that slightly annoys me. People saying, Oh, it was so obvious. I mean, of course it was. And you know, and then I think you're doing a disservice to people who are around that individual and then suddenly you get them dragged into the blame game around not being whistleblowers. And then we start blaming them. We start talking about them, which is, again, what indestructible talks about quite a bit, and the perpetrator somehow is less brought to account. In a strange way, the people around that person don't really ever get the day in court in the same way, even if that person is convicted or if they get off, the stigma still seems to remain around the people who are around that individual people. You were talking to Eric Gill as well. He's the guy who creates the statue on the front of the BBC that was defaced a couple of times recently because it is of is is of his daughters, his daughter. The model of I.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 9:54
Think is his daughter.
Mary Swan 9:56
She's it's a naked clearly a child.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 9:58
Yes. Yeah. It's interesting because other institutions which have a similar problem because Reece now into a national trust property this property had been built on sugar and so therefore it was built on the slave trade. And they made a very good exhibition about about where the money came from, the issues that this raises. And I thought, well done, You could have just pretended it didn't exist or you could have gone. Why? We need to close all these buildings down now, because there implicated in the slave trade. But that doesn't help anybody because then we don't have an issue to talk about. We try and take parts of history out and people look at and go, Well, what happened there? Well, nothing happened. It's fine. We just go over that and you're educating people coming in who might just go out for, you know, let's go and have a look at nice stately home. Well, it is a nice building, but it is built on profit from slavery and from people's misery. Being aware of is helpful. Similarly, getting rid of it isn't helpful either. So we should have a conversation rather than just scrap everything.
Mary Swan 11:00
Yeah. No, Mary would.
Mary Rose 11:01
Well, possibly going off topic, but thinking about Roald Dahl and the fact that I believe Puffin have hired sensitivity writers to rewrite passages and that day out words like Fat and Ugly. And I remember reading them as a child. I remember reading them to my goddaughter and not really thinking that much about it. And now I'm reading them to my children and the language does feel really offensive, but are we just doing too much curation? It's really challenging.
Mary Swan 11:33
It is sort. I think what makes me uncomfortable about that is, is you're actually physically tampering with another artist's work. You are actually changing the language of a writer.
It's difficult, isn't it? Because again, Enid Blyton, there's a lot of dodgy stuff in all of those books phrases we wouldn't use was one is what we talk about a lot in the show is around the effect of context. So being able to understand the context of something suddenly creates an understanding of it. That means that you're not taking it at face value. So the big moment in the show where we use that is around the photograph of Lee Miller sat in Hitler's bath, and I have often wondered what would happen, what would be the reaction if that picture emerged now And we talked about Zelensky and Putin's bath or celebrity nightmares. But how would people take that that idea of someone actually really facing you with the banality of evil in a way that is not obvious, is not obviously condemning or it's an odd one, isn't it? I'm not sure people would get that image now.
Saul Jaffe 12:52
Again, it's so much to do with context, isn't it? With that photograph in particular. One is a brilliant photograph, but you need to know the details, don't you? You need to know the context you can look at and go, Wow, that's powerful. On the day of Hitler's death, she's bathing in his bathtub as a message of defiance. When you look at all the individual elements of the photograph, you can miss that. Unless you know that story and you know the deeper connections of all the objects in it, then that makes you suddenly go, wow, just how powerful and how well thought through and how brilliant that narrative is in one single shot. Where do we sit? Where do you sit and how do you make those decisions? And what kind of context do you need to know to be able to understand it, be educated around it, and make your own decisions about it? Well, I read Enid Blyton to my kids. That's a personal choice. I kind say I don't feel is relevant. No, there are better authors out there. I think for me would make more of an impact in the lives of other people. Like, I know I've got a problem with this.
Mary Swan 13:50
Yeah.
Saul Jaffe 13:51
Roald Dahl I have different problems with his politics were very anti my my tribe and so other people can go well that's not really a problem because we looking at your stories and you kind of go, Yeah, he's a great writer who's a great storyteller and as a result, kids love his stuff. So there's a lot going on.
Mary Swan 14:08
Palin and I made a show about Lord Byron. Yes. Who was a very, very naughty boy.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 14:14
He was yes, I loved playing him.
Mary Swan 14:18
But there's so much in that in his life that, I mean, we had conversations about how much do we tell in a polite show.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 14:26
Yes, exactly. I don't think any of his foibles in his life come through in his work, really reading his work. He obviously got around through, ladies and gentlemen, and indeed, his sister, you could, for those reasons, cancel his work, but it doesn't appear in the work. Why does it seem spare in the work? And a lot of his poetry is especially she walks in beauty like the Night is a beautiful poem about the beauty of a woman he meets at a dance. And it was, as we said, and the play just tossed off on one night, so to speak. But yes, he is hugely problematic for those issues. But I think genius is what makes him greater than his problems. And I think you can enjoy the work without taking on the problems. But if you do take on the problems, then it's your decision whether to enjoy the work or not. I think that's the same a lot of artists, because we will gradually find out more and more things about art as we know. So it might be an artist you love now, you know, 20 years down the line, you might find out an awful person, you know.
Mary Swan 15:28
I mean, the sort of the conclusion to a certain extent we come to in the shop that there is a, a sliding scale of how much people are counselled in their private life. But the work is it's still acceptable depending on the level of genius. There's an equation, isn't there, of like this level of genius equals this much bad behaviour that we still hang your pictures in the gallery because as consistently is pointed out, if we removed any problematic artists, visual artists from galleries, we'd have precious little room. Partly because I don't hang female artists. Work might be the other thing. But I do think also, you know, it's interesting how so much of this is around people also who are safely dead.
Mary Rose 16:05
I think there's also something around the PR machine. If you think about modern celebrities and no publicity is bad publicity. And again, where do you draw the line? Because there would be a lot of building that brands. The behaviour is notorious and they're anarchic and that can make someone really exciting. And then where does that tip over into being too much or condemnable behaviour? I think, you know, again it goes back to who sets the level.
Mary Swan 16:33
F Yeah, as you say, it's a completely changing landscape and again it's something we talk a little bit about in the show around levels of behaviour and it's kind of that interesting. Do we lose something? Are we becoming quite Victorian? And actually, you know, Byron would definitely have been that person that would have been just at some point somebody would have said, this is too much.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 16:54
Yeah, definitely. Yes. And I think he realised that was probably happening, that he'd overstepped the mark and that's why he fled the England. But yeah, I mean there is also the danger that culture becomes Magnolia and anybody scared of doing anything slightly alternative or different in case they do get judged or perceived as a problem, an issue perhaps you would get those people who will go out there on a limb, go out and be different, because then that then makes them different from the rest of the people who try to conform.
Mary Swan 17:30
To.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 17:31
Whatever the society is that we're trying to make.
Mary Swan 17:37
Okay, So look, we can talk about this all night and probably shouldn't, but I'm asking everyone who comes on this podcast to bring with them, as it were, a female artist that they feel more people should be aware of. I hesitate to sound known because people will know some of these people look, of course I know that person, but someone that you feel doesn't get the exposure they deserve. So pull. Can I start with you? Who is your want to be better known? Female artist.
Paul Huntley-Thomas 18:08
My one is Gerda Taro. She was a female war photographer and spoiler. She died in the Spanish Civil War, but it was her and Robert Kapur's relationship together to Robert Capa. That wasn't his real name. He was a Jewish gentleman, and he and Gerda Taro together decided that their photographs would sell better if they had a more white middle class name. So they created this character called Robert Capa, and they both used the same name. So some of Robert Kapur's photographs are probably taken by Gerda Taro, and they both influenced each other. Unfortunately, she died in the Spanish Civil War. And Robert Capa went on to obviously the Second World War and the Korean War. And so he carried the name forward. And I guess he's more well known by being a male photographer and also by being the survivor. You know, they both taught each other film. They're both tortured. I had to take photographs, but they both use different cameras. So you can quite often tell what is a go to tomorrow photograph under Robert Kaplan's name. And what is a Robert Cappa photo? Because the format's a different. So yeah, I happened to find her one day when we're looking through Lehman, I was looking at other female war photographers and she popped up and I thought, I've never heard of her. So yes, I go to tarot is my take away for this show.
Mary Swan 19:27
Oh, brilliant. So who would you like to bring to the table?
Saul Jaffe 19:30
The one that I reminded myself about and had really forgotten about her is Artemisia Gentileschi, who was a female painter during the Renaissance. And I just had a thing for a while about Caravaggio. It was something about him as a character that she when you see her work, I thought the first time I saw the painting called Judith beheading her often he's the Assyrian general I thought was Caravaggio to begin with. And I looked and then looked into her work. And it's extraordinary the strength that you feel when she's holding the sword to cut off his head. You can see the muscles, the tautness, the dynamism in this painting is amazing. She was born in Rome. She moved to Florence. She became the first woman to be a member of the Academy of Arts, of drawing in 1616 and just the achievements that she had, not just as a painter, but as as a person in life, ploughing her own path, but also leaving this legacy of extraordinary paintings made me realize I had to delve in to find out more about her than the story of Caravaggio, which was more readily available. So she's my choice.
Mary Swan 20:35
Artemisia Gentileschi It's amazing, isn't it, Because you people so often feel because female artists of that period there weren't any or they were painting flowers. But it's extraordinary because that painting is incredible and new light. Why is there not more of her work in museums? Why then not more of the work of female artists at that point?
Saul Jaffe 20:54
And I don't know what the excuse is. My third choice would have been for Ben. I know of her through a friend, Vincent, who's a professor of drama, and she wrote a thesis for Ben, so I know through her about her work. But again, I still haven't seen it. I've seen it staged. And she was just shortly the generation after Shakespeare, the first woman to be, makes her living as as a writer. So there's no sort of excuse. The work is there? But what is the reason for not exhibiting? Again, this is not the subject matter that go into in the play.
Mary Swan 21:27
That's it for this edition of Indestructible. My name is Mary Swan. I'd like to thank all my guests, Mary Rose or Geoffrey Paul Thomas. If you like what you've heard, please leave us a five star review. Share it on social media. Tell your friends thanks for coming with us on this journey. You can listen to this podcast anytime, anywhere. You get your podcasts.