The art of deception
Image: Tharanya Tharan and Samson Alston in The Credeaux Canvas. Photo: David Hooley
THIS PRODUCTION HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Lambert House Enterprises presented The Credeaux Canvas in Sydney in July 2020 – between lockdowns. A masked, extremely restricted audience sat well-spaced in the bunker-like theatre of El Rocco in Kings Cross. Regardless of the fact that it was virtually the only show in town, The Credeaux Canvas proved to be a popular and critical success.
Now, with regulatory shackles removed, The Credeaux Canvas is being remounted in the New Theatre where it can play to a larger potential audience and access higher production values.
Written by American playwright, Keith Bunin in 2002, and set contemporaneously in a New York apartment, the play is a story of youth, greed, honour, deception, art, integrity and love.
Samson Alston reprises his role from the 2020 season as Winston, a young art student with evident talent who is currently copying the work of an obscure painter, Jean-Paul Credeaux, for an assignment. He shares a very small New York apartment with Jamie (Mitch Roberts), a real estate agent whose recently deceased father, a high-profile art dealer, disinherited him.
Despite their very modest abode, both young men are struggling pay rent. Jamie’s girlfriend, Amelia (Tharanya Tharan) is a frequent visitor to the apartment and the three characters clearly share a strong bond – and perhaps something more?
A confluence of elements leads them to devise a plan to deceive an art lover, Tess (Michelle Collins) who had been a friend of Jamie’s father and who therefore implicitly trusted Jamie. She also happened to be a big fan of Credeaux.
As the plot progresses, so too does the intrigue. There are mysteries, there is moral and sexual tension, there is nudity and there is also lots of humour.
Les Solomon returns as director after having brought The Credeaux Canvas to Sydney originally. With three-quarters of the cast being new to the production, a larger stage, and an audience whose reactions can be seen, it should be a very different, very exciting experience.
