There is a palpable irony to the umbrella title of Nick Dear’s two plays about William Hogarth. The Art of Success, originally staged by the RSC in 1986, offers a rumbustious portrait of the artist as a young man in his creative heyday. The new piece, The Taste of the Town, is a more sombre, reflective work showing Hogarth as an embittered oldster. Even though I preferred the dash and spirit of the first play, the two works offer an intriguing insight into the true nature of Hogarth’s genius.
Hogarth was supremely a social painter and London was his canvas. That comes across with abundant clarity in The Art of Success, set in the 1730s. Hogarth, rejoicing in the acclaim for A Harlot’s Progress, is a wildly clubbable figure and, although newly married to Jane Thornhill, an enthusiastic patron of the city’s night workers. But Dear also highlights the paradoxes within Hogarth. Angry at seeing his work pirated, he champions the new copyright laws introduced by Sir Robert Walpole. At the same time, when Hogarth portrays a murderess on the eve of her execution, he finds she is the one who violently protects exploitation of her image.
Like one of Hogarth’s own works, the play is really a conversation piece: a picture of the age as well as an individual. Dear takes us into the brothels, the prisons and the drinking clubs while also reminding us of the punitive power of Walpole who, outraged by Henry Fielding’s stage satires, introduced a form of theatrical censorship that would last until 1968. Anthony Banks’s production offers a vivid panorama of 18th-century London and contains striking performances from Bryan Dick as a defiantly working-class Hogarth, Ruby Bentall as his genteel wife and Jasmine Jones as the aggrieved killer.
Everything has changed by the time we get to The Taste of the Town. The time is the 1760s and Hogarth is now living in rural seclusion in Chiswick. He is, however, even angrier than he was as a young man. He is bullying and abusive to his wife, rages against his rival, Joshua Reynolds, and feels insulted by the town’s rejection of his attempt at classical portraiture in Sigismunda. Keith Allen plays him with the right foul-mouthed vigour and it is hard to disagree with the dismissal of him as a bumptious oaf.
You feel Dear has fallen out of love with his hero. The real strength of the second play lies in its portrait of the people around Hogarth. Mark Umbers is very funny as the great actor David Garrick, who always steers the conversation round to himself.
Ian Hallard, with cupid’s-bow mouth and dandified gestures, gives a lethally precise picture of Horace Walpole, sitting in his gothic construct at Strawberry Hill acting as an arbiter of taste. Sylvestra Le Touzel also makes Lady Thornhill, Hogarth’s mother-in- law, a figure of memorably whaleboned snobbery.
Dear’s point is that the aged Hogarth was out of tune with the times and failed to understand that his supreme gift was for satire and sharp-eyed social observation. It’s a perfectly valid argument but it’s more fun watching the young Hogarth tearing through London like a rakehelly Raphael.
At Rose theatre, Kingston, until 21 October.
