Rehearsed Reading: The Reckoning by Brian McAvera

Rehearsed reading of 'The Reckoning', a new play by Brian McAvera about Venetian Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto.
About this Event

The Reckoning is a new play by Brian McAvera about Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, once almost forgotten, yet now recognised as one of the most important artists of the Renaissance.

This rehearsed reading features Ruairi Conaghan as Lorenzo Lotto and Mary McGurk as the Reckoner. It is directed by Joe Devlin, with consultant Michael Quinn.

Running Time: 90 minutes (Approx).

About the play

Lotto painted compositionally daring portraits and religious altarpieces. Today, his work is regarded as better even than Titian or Tintoretto. This is because he quarried not only for external appearances but also the psychology of the sitter. Put simply, he tried to go inside their heads.

Lotto never married, was intensely religious, and was somehow forgotten within a decade of his death, only to be resurrected by the famous art historian Bernard Berenson at the end of the nineteenth century.

Thanks to a substantial award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, playwright and curator Brian McAvera journeyed through Italy, following in Lotto’s footsteps. The result is a play which looks not only at his art but at his personality, his sexuality, his religious impulses, and at the culture of the time.

It is a two-hander, set in a seeming Purgatory (though not the one that we think we know about) in which Lotto finds himself being interrogated by a female Reckoner, who is not about to be cowed by any man!

McAvera is perhaps best known for the cycle of eight plays Picasso’s Women, which have been translated for productions in over twenty languages.