Setting the dining room: a theatrical dialogue between Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre and Whistler’s Peacock Room

Abstract

The typological and practical boundaries of what is, and what is not, “_ Room” remain fluid in the twenty-first century. As contemporary theatre has offered a renewed focus on spatial and material affordances, so it draws closer to rooms, inviting an explicit emphasis on the assemblages which position a staged encounter, be that in a private domestic dining room, its reassembly within a museum scenario, or a temporary fine art installation in dialogue with that particular dining room. Theatre has a long and established history of scenography and experimentation of spatial configurations to convey intangible sentiment. By deploying a scenographic lens, this article explores the emotional relationship between multiple renditions of a single, celebrated, historic dining room: James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s Aesthetic masterpiece, the Peacock Room; the Smithsonian’s restaging of this room; and American artist, Darren Waterston’s fine art installation Filthy Lucre. Filthy Lucre is an artist’s reimagining which presents an agitated and alternative vision of the illustrious Peacock Room, embodying the dramatic conflict of its creation, and the tensions which emerged between patron and designer. Together these rooms initiate a dialogue between the acts of preserving a room-space and interrogating its complex and multifaceted histories. Waterston exposes dramaturgical and material languages of the interior, deploying the performative to expose the power and tensions beneath the dazzling surfaces of Whistler’s Peacock Room. The article encourages us to consider our rooms as more than their typological designation, and instead offers the provocation of room-making as a form of scenography.