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'Tonight it's the Klimt clinch': restaging great art in lockdown Dublin

Lockdown is producing all kinds of diversions. Molly O’Cathain, a theatre designer, was home in Dublin for a few days’ break from a year working at the National Theatre in London when the shutters came down. To start with, she says, “I got really bored living in my parents’ house – sleeping behind the sofa – as a 27-year-old.” She decided they all needed a distraction.

“I’d seen a tweet from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, aimed at kids, asking them to re-create Old Masters with three items from their cupboards. So that was how it started.” Each day since then, she has conjured a portrait that casts her mother, Liz, and father, Brian, both 60, as leads in famous paintings.

They began modestly enough, dressed as the stiff homesteaders of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Since then, they have kissed like a Gustav Klimt, stared at each other in profile like the 15th-century Duke and Duchess of Urbino (“Brian and Liz of Dublino”) in Piero della Francesca’s diptych, and, respectively, channelled Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí. Friday’s tableau, an uncanny recreation of David Hockney’s most poignant portrait, My Parents, was the most challenging yet, not least because it involved moving all the dining room furniture around.

Though O’Cathain originally set the challenge, her parents have become more than willing accomplices. “One day we were doing the Renaissance woman. Mum disappeared to the kitchen and came back with her face covered in flour,” she says. Another time, Brian decided he was unhappy with the sword she had made so he went away and returned brandishing a superior effort made of a bit of wardrobe, a spanner and a kitchen knife.

O’Cathain put the first few images on Instagram for her friends, but since then pressure has grown to outdo the previous day’s effort – “though it goes without saying this is entirely frivolous compared with what’s going on”. Brian, a geologist, and Liz, a textile artist, have both lately become students again and are doing online lectures during the day, so making pictures is restricted to the evenings. “Some days we leave it a bit late, so we do what we can.”

There’s no end in sight. One ambition is to try Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, but they can’t find the convex mirror that her dad thinks is packed away somewhere. “Also there is a great photo of David Bowie and Tilda Swinton where they have swapped clothes that I would like to do.”

O’Cathain thinks it is interesting how her parents’ character comes through in the pictures. “My mum looks very beautiful in the Gustav Klimt Kiss we did, despite the Ikea cushion. My dad is a perfectionist and tries to get it just right, but I like that it is a bit silly and he has a saucepan for a helmet or whatever.”