Egotistical and opportunistic, Vigée Le Brun used her royal connections to further her reputation, but at a cost. Support for the monarchy was breaking down, and Marie Antoinette was even more despised than the King; while Vigée Le Brun, no stranger to scandal herself, was linked sexually with corrupt officials to such an extent that it became necessary for her to flee France after the Revolution.

In The Colour of Flesh, Joel Gross takes Marie Antoinette (Olivia Connolly) and Vigée Le Brun (Erin Dewar) and, by adding a fictional male character, Count Alexis (Brett Cousins), creates a fictional ménage a trios. Like Sophie Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, Gross filters the social and sexual politics of the 18th century into a Mills and Boonish fable of desire frustrated first by convention, and then war and revolution.

The play takes time to gather momentum, and as the 1789 Revolution approaches, the focus changes from the public lives of the women to their personal ones. The tension within the love triangle increases as historical events unfold.

As a working-class heroine, Vigée Le Brun emerges as the most engaging character. From the opening scene, where she wittily subverts Alexis’ sexual advances and social put-downs, Dewar establishes a character who easily navigates court life to become Alexis’s lover, Marie’s confidant, and a survivor.

Throughout the play, Vigée Le Brun argues that a great portrait should reveal the character beneath the surface; a concept that the vain Marie Antoinette cannot understand until she is stripped of her wealth and privilege. Connelly’s Marie has a sense of maturity about her, even in the early scenes, where the Queen’s self-absorption is made to appear a courtly disguise for the sake of protocol. As her relationship with Vigée Le Brun deepens, a new personality emerges: that of a woman doomed by both the old and new regimes.

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