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.
On to finer things at the Royal Court. The setting of Michael Wynne’s new play is so familiar it might have come out of a catalogue. Friends meet for a party and it all goes horribly wrong. Wynne’s brilliance is to focus on a neglected phase of life, the middle thirties, the years of the late-youth crisis when couples are forming, settling and nesting, and when singletons are starting to feel isolated, panicky, weird, half-mad, suicidal or religious.
Kate has been through a summer of losses (boyfriend, baby, mum) so to cheer herself up she hires a country folly and invites her best mates over for New Year’s Eve. But her buddies’ troubles merely compound her own. What a bunch. Ticking time bombs, the lot of them. Out-of-the-closet Daniel has fallen for a teenage boy on the internet. Ben’s new fiancée is a neurotic halfwit. Poisonous TV executive Rebecca is determined to conquer the world of children’s television, and after that the universe. Her hippie husband Carl, a failed actor-turned-shopkeeper, protests his undying love for his old flame Kate. It’s complex enough to have the misfitting sense of real life.
The top-notch cast is led by Jessica Hynes as Kate, a monument of stoic inadequacy. Rachael Stirling matches her for comic excellence as Rebecca, the rapacious executive fondly nicknamed ‘the axis of evil’ by her friends. Director Jeremy Herrin has done the script full justice and created a sprawling, warm-hearted festival of yuppie cattiness. It deserves five-star reviews all round but the early notices have been curiously stingy with their praise. (It probably doesn’t help that the only thick character is also working-class.) A play like this illustrates how the motives of critic and punter sometimes diverge. The punter wants a reward for his cash, he wants a laugh, a good night out. The critic is looking for social trends, moral lessons, challenged orthodoxies to discuss. He wants a play to be ‘about’ something. What’s this one about? It’s about a couple of hours. But it sets itself a simple goal, to entertain the crowd, and it scores with dazzling assurance. The last première I saw at the Royal Court’s main house was Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth (easily the best new play I’ve ever seen). Its first revival opens at the Apollo in the New Year. If this doesn’t join it in the West End I’ll eat a boiled stoat on Boxing Day.
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