What are the great shows about artists? Few really good ones come to mind — Nicholas Wright’s Van Gogh play Vincent in Brixton, and perhaps one musical, Sondheim’s Seurat show, Sunday in the Park With George.
Yet despite the dearth, playwrights and artistic directors regularly offer them up. Perhaps placing great artists —or any famous historical figure for that matter — at the centre of a play can be a form of star casting, only less expensive. Rosetti, William Morris and Michelangelo have all been resurrected to play their tortured selves.
Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, which begins in late 19th-century Paris and spans nearly 40 years, stars the impressionists Degas and Suzanne Valadon, the one-time circus acrobat who modelled for Renoir and whose lovers included Lautrec and the composer Erik Satie. She was a fine artist in her own right even before she became Degas’s pupil. In fact, on the evidence here, she might have made a more interesting focus for Wertenbaker’s play.
Valadon was a working-class single mother who elbowed her way into Paris’s male-dominated artistic elite through sheer abundance of talent and force of character. But that story takes second place in The Line, which is set mainly in Degas’s Montmartre studio.
What we get is a battle of wills across class and gender divides — Henry Goodman’s silvery Degas versus Sarah Smart’s fiery Valadon; his authority versus her impudence. She wants to paint, he wants her to stick to drawing her “ferocious” lines. So they shout at each other a lot. And when Goodman shouts, you know it. He can go from whisper to sonic boom in a nanosecond. Which is not to say that what they shout is uninteresting, just hard on the ear.
Degas declares that new painting must be rooted in the past — “I am born after Ingres and Delacroix. I take up where they left off” — and decries the commercialisation of art. An interesting perspective to be sure, if set against the views of, say, Damien Hirst. But the play makes no connections outside the time in which it is set, and few connections outside the studio in which most of the action takes place.
William Dudley’s impressionistic design suspends translucent masterpieces like sheets on a washing line. But there is little sense of Paris outside. That is left to a revealing scene about Degas’s enthusiasm for new-fangled photography and its ability to capture the instantaneous, for which, hilariously, portrait sitters had to stay still for six minutes.
And against the background of the Dreyfus Affair Degas’s French nationalism is expressed as antisemitism — “the Jews don’t understand patriotism”, he declares. But while it is interesting that Degas sees Jews (and the music of Wagner) as a threat to his beloved France, the lesson — that great art is often created by flawed artists — is hardly new. Without Goodman’s charisma and Smart’s intelligent sass, Matthew Lloyd’s production — he brilliantly directed Goodman in Duet For One — would sink under the burden that all biographical plays have to carry — exposition.
And to be fair, Wertenbaker inconspicuously embeds much of the information about Valadon’s poverty and Degas’s privileges within the dialogue, albeit in more arguments. Though a single mother, she only cares for art, whereas Degas only has art to care for.
But as if recognising the dramatic limits of artists arguing over form and style, the author resorts to soliloquy to nail her hero’s and heroine’s attitudes. Degas’s are expressed as he finishes off an exquisite sculpture of a dancer. There should be a rule about depicting artists on stage — do not show them doing art. And although Goodman and Smart are on form, and get solid support from Selina Cadell as Degas’s spinster housemaid Zoe, actors pretending to create is as risky a business onstage as actors pretending to be footballers on screen.
Alan Bennett would have struggled with these dangers while writing his latest National Theatre offering The Habit of Art. But he came out on top by framing his play about Auden and Britten within a modern rehearsal room. So whenever there was a moment of worthy drama depicting tormented genius, the actors could drop out of character and roll their eyes. The Line has no such get out clause. And nor did many of those other lesser offerings about great artists.
(Tel: 020 7503 1646)