Degas as mentor

The Line
Arcola

The Priory
Royal Court

Sex, fame, glamour, success, genius, riches, dancing girls. It’s all there, every single bit of it, in The Line by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Her new play traces the off-kilter friendship between Edgar Degas and a gifted but unschooled prostitute-turned-artist. The cheeky little sexpot barges into the great man’s studio one day and presents him with her portfolio. Astonished by her untutored ability he buys a drawing on the spot and promises to become her mentor. With art-history plays like this, the trick is to find a storyline that’s both dramatically satisfying and factually illuminating. Timberlake’s talent doesn’t let her down here. The truth does. There’s no romance between these two stubborn, truculent crosspatches. They don’t even like each other much. Their paths merge but never mingle. The play’s scope is uncomfortably vast and its 17 scenes feel choppy and fragmented. Over three decades we watch little Miss Tarty-Pants as she rises from the gutter and achieves wealth and acclaim while Degas declines into crotchety nationalism and paranoid pomposity.

Henry Goodman approaches the role of Degas, as he approaches all his parts, like a man opening a boiled egg with a sledgehammer. He knows how to use a spoon, indeed he has a spoon beside his plate, but he finds the sledgehammer more exhilarating. Always watchable, Goodman is particularly adept at portraying Degas’s final feeble years, his voice having collapsed into a decrepit whistle. The script offers hints that greatness lurks here somewhere, if not in the subject then certainly in the writer. Degas’s self-knowing intelligence shines through. He ranks drawing higher than painting because it exposes, rather than conceals, incompetence. Fame irks him and his response to it is crazy but understandable: he wants to be renowned yet unknown. He foresees that history will remember him as the man who painted ‘women in tubs’. ‘The age of the epic is over,’ he says, ‘this is the age of the keyhole.’ A quietly devastating prophecy. Those few words encapsulate the entire history of the visual arts in the 20th century, the ascendancy of celluloid and video tape, and the migration of picture-making from the salon to the sitting-room. Sadly, the script reaches these heights only rarely.

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