Once again one of the highlights of going to the theatre as often as I do is finding out about people and events you'd think would be better known than they actually are, but have been largely forgotten - either because of an accident of history or, as is often the case and including Ellen Brammar's
Modest, because of institutional inequalities. Here the central character is Elizabeth Thompson, a painter who narrowly missed out on becoming the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy. What makes her such a particular outlier is that it would take another 42 years before the first woman (Annie Swynnerton, because I can Google stuff,) would
actually join the institution. Paul Smith and Luke Skilbeck's production explores the gender conflicts in the story by putting Elizabeth (Emer Dineen) at the heart of an empowering drag show.
