“If only we had a David Hockney image of Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth or Tom Phillips’s take on Simon Russell Beale or Antony Sher as Richard III. The list of performances one would love to have seen painted is endless: Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind, Peggy Ashcroft as mad Queen Margaret, Ian McKellen as Richard II, Mark Rylance as Hamlet. Why don’t theatres take the initiative and start commissioning painters to preserve individual performances for posterity?”