Rosemary Anne Sisson (1923-2017)
‘The Splendid Outcast’, stage designs

20 x 28 cm
Watercolour (set of three)

Cesar Borgia has ambitious plans and one of them is to take over the Kingdom of Naples…What follows in ‘the Splendid Outcast’ is a sordid love story. Marriages slip into affairs, affairs turn into assassinations, lust transforms to greed…

Sisson wrote this play in 1960. The stage designs that followed in 1961 are vibrant, marked with the warm tones one might expect in a play set in Renaissance period Italy. Although a writer by craft, Sisson also proves herself adept with a brush and palette, executing playful mise-en-abimes as she incorporates miniature works of art into her stage designs. The abundance of windows and light in these watercolours also gestures to a world beyond her play, quite literally breathing a breath of fresh air and life into these works.

Rosemary Anne Sisson was born in 1923 in Middlesex to the well-known Shakespeare scholar Charles Jasper Sisson, Lord Northcliffe. She developed a reputation as an acclaimed writer and playwright and was subsequently described by playwright Simon Farquhar in 2014 as being “one of television’s finest period storytellers.”