"I'm going to be unforgettable," declares the young Egon Schiele. His ugly beautiful paintings of women certainly are, with their twisted limbs and dark secrets of desire. Their unveiled eroticism is so unsettling that many perceived him as being no better than a pornographer and in 1912 he was accused of the abduction and rape of a minor. The charge was dropped, but not before another of moral depravity stuck and one of his paintings was burned.
The trial forms the centrepiece of Snoo Wilson's four-hander, which is a frustrating experience in a scrappy, uncertainly acted production. You leave knowing a great deal more about Schiele, a man with an infinite belief in his own genius, but nothing about the woman he painted and rather less about why Wilson wanted to write the play. It's as if there is a bigger and bolder play struggling to escape – a play that asks many questions: what is genius? How much is the artist a product of his or her time? Can you separate the person from the painter and the conscious from the unconscious, and if Adolf Hitler had got into art school would history have been different?
These questions are floated but not explored in an awkwardly structured piece that casts Schiele's mentor Gustav Klimt as narrator and the audience as judge and jury. There are flashes of humour – a pair of arresting PC Plods; the moment when Schiele announces: "My unconscious feels like a constipated dragon" – but the play never gets close to explaining why Schiele's work still feels so vital. For that you have to return to the paintings themselves.
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