Mrs Lowry & Son (PG)
Directed by Adrian Noble

BLESSED with a an acting masterclass from two of Britain’s greatest actors at the top of their game, it’s a delight to see Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall go toe-to-toe as Lowry mother and son.

Redgrave plays the bedridden Elizabeth Lowry as a bitter, sharp-tongued snob who hates living in a poor area of Pendlebury and relishes telling her middle-aged son and carer how talentless he is and how she hates his paintings. She constantly advises him to abandon his “hobby.”

A rent collector by day and a painter by night, LS Lowry is a stoic, loving son who is desperate to make his mother happy and to obtain her approval and appreciation of his work. “I am a man who paints — nothing more, nothing less,” he tells her.

Ironically the more she demeans his art the more it compels him to continue to create something that will please her.

Based on the stage and radio play by Martyn Hesford, who also wrote the screenplay, and directed by prolific theatre director Adrian Noble, at times this comes across as a theatrical two-hander.

Flashbacks of their prior and more lavish life in high society, along with cliched shots of northern street urchins and cobbled streets taken straight out of a Hovis ad, make things a little more cinematic.

Yet it does provide an eye-opening look into Lowry’s fascination with depicting 20th-century industrial life in the north-west of England.

It may have been denounced by his mother but it turned him into an internationally renowned artist whose work sells for millions.