The Countess
He also would not have ignored his characters’ histories. Millais was a child prodigy who entered London’s Royal Academy in 1840 at the age of 11, its youngest pupil ever. It wasn’t long before he was rebelling against what he perceived as the stale, formulaic work championed by the Academy. In 1848 he teamed up with fellow students Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a collective devoted to “truth to nature.” Rather than adhere to the idealized rules codified in the Renaissance artist Raphael, they would base their work on forms and figures found in the real world. The Pre-Raphaelites painted meticulously, with exacting attention to minute detail, and if such an honest gaze resulted in a less-than-graceful composition, such was the price paid for truth.
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Payne-Hahner doesn’t know how to end any of the act’s numerous scenes–each one stops abruptly with a blackout that feels premature. But she does know how to coach her actors, resulting in rich, nuanced relationships between them. As Ruskin, Benjamin Montague is dotty and unaccountably desperate, so immersed in his musings on hypothetical beauty that he overlooks his wife’s actual beauty, keeping a notebook filled with her many “imperfections.” Jenny Connell’s Effie is a fascinating mixture of despair and bullishness as she struggles to free herself from her husband’s dominance without defying the norms of Victorian respectability. And Brendan Donaldson turns in a surprisingly affecting performance as Millais, speaking in a near monotone and delivering every line with mannered matter-of-factness yet communicating torrents of passion.
