Press coverage

The Guardian, 1 July 1997

The Guardian, 1 July 1997:
"People are always asking me how long it takes to make a show. Well, in this case, more than 20 years. I first saw Nicolas Poussin's set of paintings known as The Seven Sacraments in 1975 or 1976, hanging in the marble-floored splendour of their own room in the National Gallery of Scotland. I still have one of the battered, black-and-white postcard reproductions I bought that summer. Since then, either by accident or unconscious design, I have travelled to see the paintings every year. I've got to know them, slowly accustomed my eyes to reading their darkened canvases. Sometimes I spend hours with them; the warders in the gallery get very nervous.
Images this grand and austere were never meant to be just decoration, but to provide the occasion for a meditation, for a long, hard look at the journey of the body from baptism to deathbed that they depict." (Neil Bartlett)

Time Out, 25 June - 2 July 1997:
"The last time Neil Bartlett performed on his own in front of an installation by Robin Whitmore, he appeared naked and depilated as the unapologetic, ostracised gay painter Simeon Solomon in A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, at a chilly Butler's Wharf warehouse in 1987.
[...]
"Ten years after A Vision of Love, he and Whitmore have been inspired to work together again. This week, Bartlett slips into a white coat to pay tribute to another, much better known painter, the seventeenth-century French classicist Nicolas Poussin." (Jane Edwardes)

Fringe, 26 June 1997:
"It's no accident that the room in a hospital in which a dissection is carried out is called a theatre; it's a place where the human body is displayed, analysed, made an instrument for teaching us what encourages life and what prefigures death. The lecture theatre in the basement of the London Hospital in Whitechapel where I'll be performing is a very special place, surrounded as it is by other rooms in which birth and death are hourly realities. Back in 17th-cenrury Rome, Poussin said that he wanted people to come quietly to the Sacraments, to see their images clearly, and to ponder their meanings deeply. I hope I've found a place and a way of performing that will make that possible, in London, now." (Neil Bartlett)

Independent on Sunday, 29 June 1997:
"The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin opens this week in a medical lecture room in the Royal London Hospital Based on Poussin's series of 17th-century paintings depicting the seven distinct moments when the sacraments of the Christian church were instituted, the piece inhabits the hybridised space between art installation and theatrical performance. Bartlett works with different images of the body - using as a starting point the mysterious, protean, yellow-robed figure of Poussin's paintings - and traces its passage from baptism to death. It is Artangel's first involvement with the spoken word and each performance features new work by video artist Robin Whitmore." (Maggie O'Farrell)

Gay Times, July 1997:
"He can be the most theatrical and unashamedly camp of directors, but Bartlett is to perform Seven Sacraments in the most untheatrical and hostile of spaces; a lecture room in the depths of Whitechapel's forbidding London Hospital. It is the fusion of place and performance that promises to make this piece extraordinary, even in Bartlett's rich oeuvre. And, he adds mischievously, that as a gay artist he's simply doing what gay men delight in - "doing something in the space you're not supposed to do it in". What makes this performance so special for him is that 'We know that somebody in that hospital will die that night, peaple will be born around the corner." The performance and the audience will inhabit an institution where the joy of life and pain of death are daily occurrences. The piece itself will only be performed for seven nights - an ephemeral life of a single week." (Sean O Connor)

The Daily Telegraph, 4 July 1997:
"This is a curious, original and at times deeply moving show. For 20 years now, Neil Bartlett, gay novelist, actor and artistic director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, has been fascinated by Poussin's seven paintings depicting the sacraments of the Catholic faith. They hang in the National Gallery in Scotland, in a dark, chapel-like room, and I have always found them dauntingly formal, fustily academic works that refuse to yield up their meaning. With his vivid description and personal engagement, Bartlett makes them live." (Charles Spencer)

The Guardian, 3 July 1997:
"The final image, as we file into another room, is of Bartlett silently grieving over an empty hospital bed. But, best of all, he reminds us that anything is possible in theatre; not only that you can endlessly reinvent the form but that it is one of the places where a group of total strangers can foregather and be reminded, while being instructed and entertained, of their common humanity. Religious worship may be in decline, as Bartlett implies. But the act of theatre can become a form of holy communion." (Michael Billington)