A Thing of Beauty

“The Camera is a great tool. It can create beauty where there is none.” Leni Riefenstahl.

Imogen Stubbs stars as Leni Riefenstahl in A Thing of Beauty, a fictional play about the legendary film icon whose work inspired George Lucas and Steven Spielberg but forever blighted by her association with the Nazis.

In the Summer of 1972, Leni Riefenstahl agrees to an in-depth interview with Harry Adams, a BBC documentary superstar nursing his own demons. Leni, older than Harry by more than a comfortable number of years, and Harry, each of them fuelled by their own ambition, fear, lies and ego, are shocked by the thunderbolt of mutual desire.

A Thing of Beauty asks can we… should we… ever detach art from the artist. And in this time of false truth, of cancelling, of revisionism, has it ever been more important to examine art as propaganda?

Starring Imogen Stubbs as Leni Riefenstahl and written by Wendy Oberman and Jonathan Lewis, this new play enjoys a limited three-performance preview run in Cheltenham