Tacita Dean review – cloudy confessions and Hockney on camera

Sitting in his Los Angeles studio, David Hockney looks at the wall and smokes. For the last couple of years, Tacita Dean has also been living in LA, where she got to know the painter, whose portrait of Dean’s son Rufus hangs in the blurry distance of Dean’s filmed portrait of Hockney. Rufus, in waistcoat and tie, notebook and pencil in hand, gives Hockney a serious painted stare.

Contemplating something out of shot, smoking in his comfy armchair, Hockney is surrounded by the portraits that currently fill the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy in London. Unless he is acting the role of spectator – or sitter, or the painter thinking, as he smokes and smokes, lighting up and stubbing out, rolling his tongue around his mouth – Hockney has stopped thinking about the camera.

Previously, Dean has filmed the arte povera sculptor Mario Merz sitting in the sun, Cy Twombly in his studio, poet Michael Hamburger with his garden apples, her uncle Boots in an art deco mansion, choreographer Merce Cunningham rehearsing with his dancers in San Francisco. Many of her portraits (apart from one of New York painter Julie Mehretu) have been of the elderly. Many have died not long after she filmed them. For a while, Dean thought she might be jinxed.

We see Hockney in profile, and across a low table, and stooping to read something on the cabinet that lines a wall of his studio. At one point, he erupts into a cackling laugh, saying something about enjoying smoking, but the words are distorted in the echo of the studio – and in the basement of Frith Street Gallery where the film is being screened. There is only me here, and Dean’s clattering film projector, running the endless loop.

Perhaps everything Dean does is a kind of portrait. Upstairs are chalk drawings and photographs of the sky, cumulus clouds and contrails. Little phrases appear among those clouds but I can’t quite read them. Thoughts in the clouds then, evaporating.

Actor Stephen Dillane paces a circle drawn on the perimeter of an empty stage, huffing and groaning as he psyches himself up. There’s only him and two film crews there, recording his every move, as the audience files in. “Fuck.” He mutters, cursing under his breath, just audible over the audience chatter. “Too fucking cosy for starters,” he says. “Too fucking cosy by half.” Event for a Stage is Dean’s first foray into theatre. It has also, as was always intended, become a film.

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What a complex and risky work this is. Beyond Dillane’s pacing silhouette, the art audience seems to bother the actor, whom Dean has persuaded to cross the globe, with a script half written or not written at all, to perform at the 2014 Sydney Biennale. The film of Event for a Stage, completed last year, focuses on Dillane (latterly known as Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones) for the entirety of four spliced-together 50-minute performances. Each day in Sydney, he wore his hair differently, allowing us to see the intercutting of the footage. Hair loose, tied with a bow, bewigged, bearded, clean-shaven, Dillane’s personas come and go as he maunders, struts and paces, performing Prospero’s lines from The Tempest and reading Heinrich von Kleist’s marvellous short story, On the Marionette Theatre, written the year before the author shot himself and his lover in a suicide pact.

Dean and Dellane have a pact of their own, though one marked by the actor’s palpable disenchantment and estrangement from his role. Seated in the audience, Dean passes him pages of script, all concerning the predicament of acting and the artifice of theatre. He reads with undisguised ill-temper, sometimes sarcasm, then drops the pages to the floor like a litter of footnotes. This alternates with the story of his relationship with his parents, both of whom, late in life, disappeared into the fogs of dementia. His father, a surgeon born in Australia developed, Dillane says, “an unconventional relationship with the characters in a TV series”. As he lay on the floor of his nursing home room, protesting that he was off camping in the mountains, his mother lived entirely in a joyous present.

Dillane falls in and out of roles. “I am an actor playing the role of an actor,” he says. “Unfortunately, the role of an actor is no role at all.” What really is the role, if he even has one? When he appears to be being himself, isn’t that a role too? He tells us that Dean wanted to make a portrait of an actor in context, in his natural habitat, like a beast in its lair. “The main reason I always chose or didn’t choose to do a piece of theatre was the quality of the text,’’ he explains. “And this is not a great text. I don’t know what this is.” Did he write these lines? Did Dean? Did she script his cynicism and discontent?

It is impossible to tell what is authentic. Early in the performance, Dillane the actor tells us that Dean doesn’t like it when her subjects appear self-conscious, aware of themselves, aware of being watched. In her film of Hockney, the painter’s self-consciousness erupts with a laugh and a few ejaculated words, before returning to his self-absorption, his silent, patient ruminations for the camera. But that, too, is in question.

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Event for a Stage reflects its own artifice, and plays with different kinds and levels of truth, with artificial antagonisms and real confession, or the other way round, in the authentic fakery of performance. At one point, the actor worries that he is giving one of those performances “that make you despise actors and the theatre and are why you never go any more. I wish I could leave the stage”. At which, Dillane walks out of the theatre, banging the fire exit door as he goes. Does this happen every time?

The camera keeps rolling, awaiting his return. Watching, I thought about Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, and John Berger and artist Juan Muñoz’s 1996 radio play Will It Be a Likeness (later filmed in live performance), both concerned with the artifice of theatre, and the illusion of reality. At some level, art is always a commentary on its own plight: painting, whatever else it might do, has something to say about its flatness. Sculpture can never escape its relationship to gravity and space. Actors squirm about in the bubble of disbelief, protected by a membrane, the actor caught – as Dillane says – between flying and drying.

Dean too, struggles against the inertia of cliche, the things we think we already know but do not give voice to. Writing this, I am performing my art-critic schtick. “Theatre is life as spectacle. Theatre is what makes life more interesting than theatre. Art is what makes life more interesting than art,” says the actor at one point. I guess Dean wrote that. What a performance it all is. All I can say is: go.

• Tacita Dean: LA Exuberance and Event for a Stage are at Frith Street Gallery, London, until 4 November.