The Art of SuccessThe Financial Times; Jul 10, 1986; Michael Coveney;
The Observer; Jul 13, 1986; Michael Ratcliffe;
The Times; Jul 11, 1987; Irving Wardle;
The Financial Times; Aug 20, 1987; B A Young;
The Guardian; Aug 21, 1987; Nicholas de Jongh;
Daily Telegraph; Aug 28, 1987; Charles Spencer;The Financial Times; Jul 10, 1986; Michael Coveney;
Nick Dear’s play about William Hogarth for the RSC in The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, is an imaginative debunking job similar in some ways to Edward Bond’s ‘Bingo’. Like Bond’s Shakespeare, Dear’s Hogarth is an artist who likes to eat and believes in accommodating compromise in order to do so. He is a target of first suspicion and second, in Dear’s book, derision...
...advent of stage censorship is the dramatic crux, with a Fielding lampoon invading the theatre in a vigorous and tumbling clictic sequence. In Adrian Noble’s spirited production of a refreshingly raw and scabrous text, this scene is a splendid hotpot of masque and satire, as Fielding himself (Philip Franks) spewingly insults Walpole from the gallery, Hogarth buries his face in the rump of his favourite whore, Louisa, and an escaped murderess runs amok with a knife. Joe Melia, as a stealthily sinister Walpole, springs out of the rumpus in a mustard frock-coat.
To elaborate on Mr Dear’s method. Louisa (Dinah Stabb) is a loose evocation of the ruined Moll Hackabout in ‘The Harlot’s Progress’, who indulges Hogarth’s coprophiliac and bestial tendencies. The murderess, Sarah Sprackling (Penny Downie), is based on Sarah Malcolm, whom Hogarth visited in Newgate and drew two days before she hanged; Mr Dear writes a marvellous duet for artist and model before she knifes her jailer and goes on a spree to reclaim the portrait which, she feels, misreprents her. And his wife, Jane (Niahm Cusack), garbles about the Line of Beauty – the play’s only reference to Hogarth’s aesthetic theory, but recoils from rough sex in public, which seems reasonable enough. Hogarth repays her with pornographic portraits.
So instead of the famous moral anatomist of the London down-trodden, we have a drunken, riotous, chauvinist misogynist. The girls gang up on him. This all sounds a little trendy to me, but the comic point is made that truthful artists rarely please the subjects they paint or draw. And this area of the play is much stronger than the attempt to inject a discussion on artistic cowardice and responsibility into dialogue between Hogarth and Fielding. The play is more characterised by its gutsy scatological exchanges between Hogarth and Louisa.
Michael Kitchen is not a “five-foot man” but he has a stalky, coarse-grained ebullience as Hogarth, especially in the riotous opening scene at the Beefsteak Club. Dead drunk, he fights off the slobbering account of a Grand Tour and the value of art delivered by Simon Russell Beale.
Events are compacted, regardless of chronology, and the evening bristles with a health air of anachronism. As the play closes, the artist glimpses the future of Polaroid cameras in a torrid nightmare, which features Jane in babydoll underwear, mounted by all and sundry (and Walpole) from every conceivable direction. The Other Place is brilliantly exploited in Ultz’s platform design (Ultz has also supplied the fine costumes and wigs).
The Observer; Jul 13, 1986; Michael Ratcliffe;
In The Art of Success (The Other Place) Nick Dear has messed deep in the guts of Hanoverian London and come up with a dark and crackling play about Hogarth that covers a wide range of territory across sex, society and art. “To exist in the future,” Walpole (Joe Melia) warns Hogarth (Michael Kitchen) before shutting down Fielding’s playhouse and establishing censorship through the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, “you must function in the present”. It is a recurring RSC anxiety (Red Nose, Mephisto, Red Star, Moliere) but whether Mr Dear deplores Hogarth’s accommodations or merely accepts them as not to be avoided is unclear.
What is clear is a gift to bring to life an historic age not only with blowsy and fly-blown images of corruption – most yong writers could summon the disgust for that – but also (much more difficult) to sustain a modern equivalent for the plausible chatter of everyday speech. Kitchen is the master of this throw-away idiom; Melia matches him with abbreviating vulgarities that come straight to the point; and there are marvellous performances from Penny Downie as an avenging murderess and Dinah Stabb as Hogarth’s caustic whore.
Adrian Noble, who directs with such clarifying energy in this small space, invents a theatrical limbo in which the historic events of 10 years are compressed into one night and where all levels of society meet on a huge blank sheet of drawing paper suspended on steel hawsers like the lines of an engraver’s perspective, (Designer, Ultz, and perfect).
The Times; Jul 11, 1987; Irving Wardle;
Thanks to his introduction of censorship, Robert Walpole remains a lively figure on the British theatre scene. But, whatever his baneful influence on the stage: it was also Walpole who put through the 1735 Copyright Act which guaranteed the livelihood of another group of artists by protecting them from piracy. The immediate victim and the immediate beneficiary of those two Acts were Henry Fielding and William Hogarth. Fielding, you might say, was asking for it, which raises the question of whether Hogarth was being rewarded for services rendered...
You get the style from the opening AGM of the Beefsteak Club, with the chairman casting his vote for laying on some whores under Any Other Business and Hogarth confronting an art-collecting mi-lord like an 18th-century Don McCullin facing the director of the National Portrait Gallery. The play latches onto the fact that Hogarth was working in a area despised by graduates of the Grand Tour; and that, for all his realism, he did not satirize recognizable personalities. Why not a Statesman’s Progress to follow the Harlot’s Progress, Fielding asks, and is brushed off by the proudly independent painter.
The rest of the play proceeds to call his independence to question. He visits a condemned murderess in Newgate, frankly telling her that he is only drawing her in hope of making a large profit. It then appears that he has already secretly accepted an engraving commission from Walpole and is on the way to becoming his creature. To describe the action like that is to suggest that Mr Dear has written a Hogarth’s Progress. In fact he is too intent on showing all sides of the character to impale it on a didactic pin.
There is Hogarth the loving husband going back to his Covent Garden whores for the joys he cannot mention to his wife: there is Hogarth the victim of castration nightmares; and the artist who wants to niggle at public hypocrisy while also receiving a fat fee. He would be entirely at home in television or advertising and, indeed, one of his nightmares includes the gift of a Polaroid camera.
Bounding between clubland, prison and the brothel, the play accelerates into demented frenzy in which farce overlaps with the horrors. The basic structure is that of the old comedy, with Hogarth desperately making his way home in skirts like the hero of ‘The Provok’d Wife’. Mr Dear also pushes over the boundaries between comic action and fantasy, so that the murderess escapes from jail and makes for the wife’s bedroom, where Walpole himself also puts in an appearance, assuming he has interrupted a lesbian assignation.
The play is essentially about learning to close the gap between waking life and dreams; and there are times, particularly when Fielding and Hogarth’s wife takes over his education, when it grows uncomfortably sententious. Otherwise, its progress is spectacular and unfaltering.
Adrian Noble has directed it on and around a raised platform (by Ultz) first seen as a gigantic table for the slumbering drunks of the Beefsteak Club. That sets up expressionistic expectations that are honoured throughout the evening with transformations to a fetid Newgate, a whore’s pitch in Vauxhall Gardens and the Queen’s bedroom.
Altogether it suggests a pitiless world where disaster always looms, and nobody takes any precautions against it. Michael Kitchen’s Hogarth, raked equally with guilt and creative energy, comes over as one of the lads who also conceivably could be a genius. The whole company are on top form, with fiercely memorable performances from Dinah Stabb, Penny Downie as the murderess and Joe Melia as a silkily menacing Walpole forever glossing over the quirk of fortune that has taken him to the top.
The Financial Times; Aug 20, 1987; B A Young;
To show at once that this is to be a play of low life, Nick Dear starts with a meeting of successful men, the Club of Beefsteaks, and casts their talk in such filthy dialogue that hardly a line of it could be printed here. The members of the club are William Hogarth, Henry Fielding, and a merchant and a peer of no special significance.
When we enter low life proper, the dirty talk is accompanied by dirty action; and, having said all that, let me add that the play has an interesting story and an important theme. Mr Dear has chosen to express it through a series of encounters with whores, prisoners and dishonest politicians, all of them still frequent in our world 250 years later than the time of the play – and even that time is uncertain, since it must encapsulate the publication of Hogarth’s ‘The Harlot’s Progress’ and the conseqent Copyright Act and Walpole’s delivery of the theatre into the hands of the Lord Chamberlain in the events of one night.
Hogarth is represented as a man with a faithful wife, but seldom away from whores. One of these, awaiting hanging for murder, lets him draw her in her cell; but then escapes and tracks the artist down to take the portrait for herself, for it portrays her private self. Fielding has put on a satirical comedy at his theatre ridiculing Walpole for his shameless nepotism, and Walpole has the theatre shut down. These great matters are expressed in terms of black farce, directed by Adrian Noble with an equal eye on the humour and the importance, but humour side up. Melodramatic side too, and very effective.
Michael Kitchen’s playing as Hogarth is first-class, though I wonder (having no doubt done less research than Mr Dear) whether Hogarth ever was quite so common and beastly as this. There is good playing too from Philip Franks as a slightly camp Fielding. Penny Downie is fine as the condemned murderess Sarah Sprackling, a decent young woman sunk to the depth. The character is an interesting contrast with the whore Louisa, everyone’s favourite, who is a solid tradeswoman by her own standards. Niahm Cusack plays the one unquenchably good woman, Hogarth’s wife Jane, kind and understanding in almost all the difficult situations into which Mr Dear precipitates her. The cast is unchanged from last year’s production at The Other Place, Stratford, from which it now transfers.
The Guardian; Aug 21, 1987; Nicholas de Jongh;
Nick Dear’s The Art of Success, seen at Stratford in 1986, may have been composed as a romping and lubricious theatrical cartoon, with sexual desire wittily put down whenever it raises a tentative head and anachronism running rampant. But at its core the play grapples provocatively in political and social terrain, while retaining high notes of comedy.
Dear admits to taking large liberties with history and his hero William Hogarth whom he has transformed into a thoroughly modern, beer-swilling Cockney wide boy from whom you would not buy a used car, and whose language is laden with expletives. The author also compresses 10 years into the space of the play’s single sexy night and Hogarth loses all his clothes and escapes to respectability dressed in women’s attire seized from a local bawd.
Hogarth’s career was founded upon the pursuit of success, status, and cash; that he accepted the passing of the copyright act, which he inspired, would require a rude break with conscience. Dear also suggests there can be a great gulf between the personal behaviour and morality of the artist and his work, which we like to relate directly to its creator. So here the morality and satire of Hogarth’s painting runs in agonised counterpoint to his sex life.
Dear conveys these ideas with dramatic cunning, aided by a dynamic bustling production by Adrian Noble and a set of apt elegance by Ultz. It consists of a huge table, covered in wine spattered drawing paper, and a trapdoor, walkways and ladders. Dear has also found ideological points of association between that period and ours. The pursuit of wealth is the thing, and there is a constant association between the well-born and the well-off with the put-upon poor who are merely used to service the rich in more ways than one...
Dear’s language – robust, cynical and salacious – abounds in wit and vitality which condemns and expresses the spirit of the age which he wishes to excoriate, but doubts remain about his thesis. Hogarth was not interested in a copyright act for the money alone – he wanted a wider audience to see his pictures. He protested against a tyranny of rich consumers of painting. And his own work was powered by a contempt for mercenary obsession – a fact which Dear ignores in his one-dimensional portrait.
The sexual theories which informs his play are rather glib and fragmented. Therefore it is maintained by its comedy and rough farce to which Michael Kitchen’s jaunty self-deprecating William contributes prime enjoyment, while Penny Downie as the murderer, makes the woman a voice of reason and authentic wretchedness.
Daily Telegraph; Aug 28, 1987; Charles Spencer;
...But though I normally resent dramatists who appropriate the lives of famous figures of the past only to distort them for their own ends, I found myself increasingly warming to this vital, scatological drama, now receiving an exuberant production by the RSC in The Pit.
It is certainly not a play for the squeamish. The language is persistently and inventively foul and, without a hint of historical evidence, Mr Dear has turned Hogarth into a man of rampant and decidedly esoteric sexual tastes. But the play is so outrageous in its invention, Hogarth’s reputation so secure, that it is hard to imagine the play doing the artist’s memory permanent harm, more profitable to sit back and enjoy an evening of good, dirty and surprisingly thought-provoking fun.
In Dear’s fiction, Hogarth is an East Ender on the make, a Jack-the-lad around town, the 18th-century equivalent of the kind of photographer who came to prominence in the swinging 1960s. He describes his commissions as “earners” and greets his friend, the writer Fielding, with salutations like “Wotcher, ‘Arry”.
In the course of the play’s action, which compresses 10 years into the violent progress of a single night, Dear mixes riotous farce with a prodigious range of debating points. Hogarth is seen torn between his “pure” love for his wife and his appetite for rough trade with prostitutes; a multiple murderess is on the loose; and Sir Robert Walpole is very busy indeed, censoring the theatre, helping Hogarth secure his copyright act and preparing to serve Queen Caroline not only in parliament but in her bed.
Feminism, the nature of sexual happiness, the relationship between the artist and the state, and the intrusion of the media into private lives are just a few of the issues touched upon in this febrile work in which obscenely funny one-liners are juxtaposed with a real sense of intellectual curiosity.
To be honest, Dear attempts to cram in far too much, starting hares he has neither the time nor the patience to pursue. And the production’s shock tactics are occasionally self-defeating: after a manic gang-bang, a spectacular hanging seems tame stuff. But the play’s vitality rarely falters.
Adrian Noble directs with evident relish and an alert eye for the grotesque and the performances are memorable for their extravagant candour. Michael Kitchen retains his raffish charm throughout as Hogarth, giving a portrait of the artist as self-made entrepreneur, desperately trying to reconcile his conscience with the need to make money.
Joe Melia is a viperish Walpole, exuding dangerous charm, Philip Frank’s Fielding is instantly recognisable as the kind of committed young playwright of the left still with us today, and Niahm Cusack gives a performance of touching tenderness and anger as Hogath’s betrayed wife.