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Detail: Glasto for Baby by playwright and artist Dean Stalham |
‘Ex-offender’ in frame for right reasons
Dean Stalham went from handling stolen art to creating his own work and penning plays, writes Simon Wroe
THERE was a time when Dean Stalham couldn’t move for Warhol originals.
Marilyn Monroe was in his Land Rover’s passenger seat, Superman was in the back, and Chairman Mao was resting benignly in the lounge of his Cricklewood semi.
The only problem was they weren’t his. Stalham – a working-class boy who knew little about the £600,000 worth of Chagalls and Dalis and Factory prints in his possession – ended up detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for three and a half years.
If art was his undoing, it has also proved to be his redemption. He began painting while inside, inspired by reading about the stolen work he had handled, and something clicked. He remembers seeing for the first time “how art communicated without money, without greed”. Plays followed. By the time of his release in 2006 he had won three Koestler awards for his artistic endeavours.
Today he is a valuation expert for the Koestler Trust, which handles the exhibition and sale of almost all the art produced by prisoners across the country. The writing continues too: a double bill of Stalham’s underworldly dramas – If The Cap Fits and Sporadicity – is amusing and terrifying audiences at the Hen and Chickens Theatre in Islington for the next fortnight.
He has even been asked to join the Royal Court’s scriptwriting team. Yet breaking into the theatre world is proving difficult for the 45-year-old reformed thief.
“I’m confident about my work,” says Stalham. “My plays fear no one. But a prison sentence is about attaching you to the stigma and I’m still carrying that stigma with me.”
The criminal association cuts both ways for Stalham. Although he hates the “ex-offender” tag and thinks it holds him back, he still uses it to draw people in. He wants to be known as “an artist” but makes a point of his plays’ authentic gangster roots: he finds it ridiculous that criminals in The Bill don’t know how much a kilo of cocaine costs.
“They’re only imagining what that world is like,” he says. “I’m actually from that world.
Stalham’s four plays to date are all based on his chequered past – some of it too absurd for fiction. His mother and father were beatniks living in Kilburn who drove a Rolls-Royce funeral hearse and eschewed parks in favour of graveyards.
He left school at 15 to become an apprentice bricklayer under his father’s friend, “Uncle Eddie”, who turned out to be a drug dealer. He would sit on a wall and whistle to Uncle Eddie whenever someone came along, before moving on to credit card fraud, for which he served two years.
When he came out he turned his hand to antique dealing, but the operation was more Del Boy than Christies.
That’s what happened with the art. Stalham bought the bag of “cartoon pictures”, as the salesman put it, while he was purchasing a £1million fireplace at a knockdown price of £100 at a house in Belgravia.
The Warhol Marilyn turned out to be one of the rarest colour runs; when he went down to the art dealers he found half of Belgravia police waiting for him.
“They could have just called me and I’d have come down to the station,” he shrugs with a grin.
After the art collar his life fell apart. He was bailed but his business was shut down. He started using crack and was arrested, again, for the armed robbery of his local garage.
He got clean, served three and a half years, and found Koestler.
Once a king of bling with a Spanish villa, Stalham took a massive pay cut to work at the YMCA and write plays.
Even the darkest corners of Stalham’s life are recounted with wit – and lots of laughter.
How can he joke about it all?
“In prison and in the underworld you’re living on the edge, but if you haven’t got humour then you’re the walking dead,” he says.
“When the chips are down and you’ve got nothing – laugh. It’s the same with art. Life inside would have been brutal without it.”
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