Paul Binnie Sir Nigel Hawthorne in Act IV Scene IV
In the spring of 1999 Paul Binnie was approached by Thelma Holt, producer of the Royal Shakespeare Company's "King Lear", to ask him to become the Artist in Residence for the upcoming season. There was a strong Japanese feel to the production, with the director Yukio Ninagawa creating a Noh inspired world inhabited by Sir Nigel Hawthorne as Lear and Hiroyuki Sanada as the Fool. The whole presentation of the piece was created by a team of Japanese designers, and Binnie went to more than 50 performances of the play in the Barbican Theatre, London and the Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. More than five hundred works on paper were produced in the course of the performances and ten oil paintings were developed from these mainly monochrome studies.
