A former pupil of Sickert’s, Bomberg also turned to the theatre for inspiration, focusing on the audience at the lively, Yiddish-language, Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel in London’s East End. An imposing balcony rail cleaves the painting diagonally, separating the upper and lower rows both from the viewer and from each other, while a raking light bathes the upper gallery spectators in red. Bomberg’s figures retain the sharp edges that linked his pre-First World War experiments to those of the English Vorticists but their mask-like faces and closed body language, symbolised by the figure leaning wearily on a stick, suggest a powerful postwar disillusionment.