Surrealist, war photographer, fashion journalist and cookery writer – Lee Miller was a woman of many lives. But it is thanks to the efforts of her only son, Anthony Penrose, that we are still celebrating them.

Sworn enemies for most of Anthony's early life, the pair later had a reconciliation (of sorts) and since her death he has devoted himself to promoting her work in a way that would give psychologists a field day.

Following several biographies, he now brings us this “play for voices” which tells the story of Lee's startlingly rich life through photographs and excerpts from original letters and manuscripts. Man Ray, Picasso and Anthony's father Roland all come to life through the voices of actors. Anthony's daughter Ami Bouhasssane makes a wonderful – if eerily familiar – Lee.

Even for those familiar with the subject, there is plenty to delight. Aside from the pleasure of seeing such an impressive body of work projected on a large screen, there are the behind-the-scenes anecdotes not often featured in the books; Lee persuaded to lie naked in the garden covered in green camouflage paint on the highly tenuous grounds it would help a friend training for the Army. She couldn't get the paint off and an informal photograph follows, showing her eating dinner and looking in her words, “like a sprout”.

In her later incarnation as a cookery writer, Anthony wryly details his reluctance to bring friends home for tea, illustrated by a photograph of a dinner table set with a distinctly Surrealist pair of cauliflower “breasts” covered in a pink sauce and surrounded by eyeball-like boiled eggs.

As one might expect, this is a far from objective exercise – there is a very keen sense of a son trying to find excuses for a mother who didn't come up to scratch. Her alcoholism is accredited to post-traumatic stress syndrome after the war. Her seemingly careless approach to relationships is clumsily linked to the death of a childhood sweetheart.

The point the play asserts at its close seems the most prescient - Lee Miller was a real person.