Still Life: an Audience with Henrietta Moraes

"This is what we'll be working with today. The raw materials," begins Sue MacLaine, writer and performer of this one-woman show about Henrietta Moraes, the model and muse for artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. It's an unsettling start: delivered with wide-eyed glee by a nude MacLaine, it places the small audience in precisely the same position as the (mostly male) painters who repeatedly "stole her soul" for art – a soul which, with self-destructive nonchalance, Moraes repeatedly offered up. Armed with paper and pencils, we revisit the invasive acts which, in Bacon paintings such as Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, saw Moraes used as artistic material rather than human flesh.

If there's a small niggle, it's that at times MacLaine preaches in the impenetrable argot of the art school set ("the non-being negates the being it negates"), a language which feels designed to mystify rather than to be understood. But when she turns this language against herself the results are quite wonderful, sparking looping avenues of enquiry on the technical and emotional relationship between the artist and the subject of art. "Am I giving the illusion of depth?" she asks, adopting a pose which this reviewer's drawing skills summarily fail to tackle. The question is beautifully rhetorical: in a slow, thoughtful work, MacLaine once again makes Henrietta Moraes the subject of art, but in a manner which gives her a voice to whisper back at the artist, the audience and, indeed, the critic.