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Theatre: Lizzie Siddal

Tragic tale of Pre-Raphaelites' beautiful muse

Lizzie Siddal

Arcola Theatre, London E8

4 Stars

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that group of romantic yet realist young artists who rocked the staid Victorian art establishment with their vivid, high-definition paintings, were an astounding bunch. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais were at the core of a movement which challenged the stagnation of academic art but Jeremy Green's play Lizzie Siddal celebrates the only woman to have made an impact on the movement.

The eponymous artist's model, a sort of Victorian Kate Moss, is best known as Shakespeare's Ophelia in Millais's luminous painting, floating in a stream with her billowing dress buoying her up, lost in what some see as sexual rapture.

Whisked from working-class drudgery in a hat shop she soon became the muse of Rossetti - played with dash and swagger by Tom Bateman - then his lover and finally his wife.

Her flame-red hair and slender, ethereal look appealed to these artists, who wanted to banish all convention. Red hair was certainly not the fashion at the time and Siddal's scandalously free and easy dress sense helped inspire women to cast off their stays and breathe.

Emma West is the body and soul of Siddal in a performance that also captures her intelligence. She was after all very well read and a talented artist who drew the praises and sponsorship of the art critic John Ruskin, given an outstandingly creepy performance here by Daniel Crossly.

Sparky repartee fizzes and exhilarating ideas fly like shrapnel in Lotte Wakeham's spirited production, in which the genesis of the Ophelia painting is recounted. Siddal nearly froze to death in Millais's- bath when the heating failed and she was too dedicated a martyr to art to inform Millais of her suffering and fell ill.

It was all to end tragically with her early death. She took to laudanum, a lethal tincture of opium and alcohol, touted by doctors as an analgesic. But the pain she was attempting to kill was Rossetti's unfaithfulness.

He assuaged his guilt by burying his unpublished poems in her coffin which he later dug up. Millais's painting of an Ophelia lost to the world was strangely prophetic but the river Siddal later came to float in was that of addiction.

Runs until December 21. Box office: (020) 7503-1646

Michael Stewart

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