Peter Viney's Blog

Hogarth’s Progress
A double bill

By Nick Dear
Directed by Anthony Banks
Set & Costume design by Andrew D Edwards
Music by Olly Fox

Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames
Saturday 29th September 2018

The Art of Success by Nick Dear 14.30
The Taste of The Town by Nick Dear 19.30

The Art Of Success was originally performed by the RSC in 1986 and nominated for an Olivier Award. It’s about  artist and satirist, William Hogarth (1697-1764), and for this Rose revival production, Nick Dear has written a new companion piece based on “older Hogarth” as The Taste of The Town. They’re being presented separately, or as a double bill, and the play text is now called The Hogarth Plays. This Saturday production was a chance to see the two in a day. The Rose does double (and triple) bills particularly well- one click to book the lot, one seat throughout. The double bill title, Hogarth’s Progress referencesThe Rake’s Progress from 1735:

The Rake’s Progress 1735 

The Art of Success

CAST
Bryan Dick – the young William Hogarth
Ruby Bentall – Jane Hogarth
Emma Cunnife  – Louisa
Ben Deery – Frank
Jack Derges – Henry Fielding
Ian Hallard – Oliver
Susannah Harker- Queen Caroline
Jasmine Jones – Sarah Sprackling
Sylvestra le Touzel- Mrs Needham
Mark Umbers – Robert Walpole

According to the Rose website, The Art of Success compresses Hogarth’s rise to fame into “two monumental pub crawls”  through London Society and its equivalent debauched underworld. No. Not at all. There are a series of scenes of debauched London, and it starts in a drinking club, but it’s not a pub crawl. Nor, in spite of the publicity photos, is it modern dress. The Rose website gets other stuff wrong. For starters, two weeks into the run, it still says the plays are both two hours long, plus a twenty minute interval. They are actually two hours and twenty minutes each PLUS a twenty minute interval.

On this double bill Saturday there was a red carpet outside, a guest desk and signs for Press Reception. Ah, we’d hit press night. And afternoon. As a result the play started not at 14.30, but at 14.45. No annoucements. We just sat for 15 minutes waiting for the great and good to stroll in. Much worse, was Bryan Dick as Young Hogarth starts the play sitting on the ground in the pit (The Rose has a groundlings sit on the floor area, though only three takers for it today). He sat there for fifteen minutes. I know from public speaking that an unexpected delay plays havoc with your adrenalin levels. Put it this way, if you’d read the website, and parked in a Pay & Display car park, and expected a 14.30 start, you’d think it ended at 16.50. Instead it ended at 17.25. Or perhaps you’d asked someone to meet you at the end. We sometimes travel with family who go off shopping while we’re at a matinee. No, it didn’t feel long at all, that’s not the point, but inaccurate advance information irritates. Websites are easily updated!

The Rose as ever assembles a superb cast … Bryan Dick in Hobson’s Choice was one of my picks of the year for 2016, as was Emma Cunnife as Queen Anne in the RSC play of that title in 2015. Sylvestra le Touzel was Mistress Page in the RSC’s great “rugger buggers” version of Merry Wives of Windsor in 2012. Ruby Bentall plays Verity in Poldark. The Rose is an odd theatre, maybe too far out to be considered ‘London’ but too far in to be considered ‘the provinces.’

The play opens with a bang, Bryan Dick leaping from the pit to be dressed as Hogarth while a dance movement scene erupts around him. The theatre is built with three stage levels, so two high balconies,  so that’s a given and it’s used, but decoratively with characters appearing to watch below,  rather than integrated. They utilise a large screen with projections, which can be revolved to show various bedrooms (by hand, but effectively the same as having an NT style revolve stage).

The Art of Success demonstrates the anarchy of 18th century London. It starts off in the drinking club, where Mrs Needham (Sylvestra le Touzel) is the brothel keeper downstairs and offers them a menu of the delights available. One of the group of four is Henry Fielding, the novelist, who writes critical plays about the government of Robert Walpole (Mark Umbers). Frank (Ben Deery) is a viscount, an aristocrat with a taste for under age virgins. I noticed that Fielding talked about Dorset as different to London. Indeed it was, and I’ve read it was the poorest county of all in the 1730s. I thought Fielding was from Somerset in reality, though the film of Tom Jones was partly shot at Cranborne Manor in Dorset, where generations of my forbears were gardeners. Anyway … I’m probably the only one who noticed.

Jane Hogarth (Ruby Bentall) and William (Bryan Dick)

We swiftly learn that Jane Hogarth (Ruby Bentall) is a proper lady, though much interested in (and clearly turned on by) hearings of sexual goings on, which William denies. He had made his excuses and left.

William Hogarth (Bryan Dick) and Louisa (Emma Cunnife)

They both meet Louisa (Emma Cunnife) as a prostitute … and we later find out that her relationship with William goes way back. He ends up naked after he declines to pay her and she keeps his clothes.

The plot concerns two areas dear to my heart … copyright, and commercial illustration. A friend who had an art gallery shook his head in dismay at the pictures in my house, ‘They’re all illustrators …’ he complained. Well, not all, but most of them are.

Jasmine Jones as Sarah Sprackling

William Hogarth went for drawing and producing cheap prints in large quantities for the masses, but was always quickly outflanked by the pirates. He has a plan to make money- by drawing the triple murderess, Sarah Sprackling (Jasmine Jones), in her cell at Newgate Prison, and getting it printed up to sell at her hanging the next day.

Sarah Sprackling (Jasmine Jones) & Jane Hogarth (Ruby Bentall)

No plot spoiler, but things go badly wrong and Jane Hogarth ends up being threatened by Sarah, not helped when Robert Walpole turns up and assumes it’s a lesbian affair. We have also seen Walpole at it with Queen Caroline (Susannah Harker).

Queen Caroline (Susannah Harker) and Prime Minister Robert Walpole (Mark Umbers)

The whole conveys the nature of the day. Degradation and poverty on all sides with corrupt society trying to exploit it. Lots of art and literary references … veering to in-joke / assumed knowledge at times. The set was exciting, moving, changing. Great choices for projections. While it did convey the chaos with first rate physical work, it also feels rather disjointed as a play. That suits the era. Hogarth ends up in a purloined dress taking pictures of an orgy with his wife, then being succumbed to a similar passive role himself. He does have fantasy sequences. The text says a camera with flash appears. Obviously in 2018, this was a cell phone. The scenes are projected.

William Hogarth (Bryan Dick) with cell phone and skirt. Jane (Ruby Bentall) assailed by four men.

The Rose has suffered criticism in the past for eschewing colour blindness and gender blindness, but as the main characters are historical persons I think that’s fair enough. However … the review up before mine (LINKED) from fellow bloggers (theyoughttobeclowns) says:

The reliance on an all-white cast to tell Hogarth’s Progress is another mis-step from a Rose Theatre Kingston who should know better … this feels misguided by director Anthony Banks. In a theatre that was mired in a similar controversy just a couple of years ago, it feels wilfully ignorant. A regional theatre does have to take the conservatism (small c) of its patrons into account but equally, this is the 21st century and if theatre ignores the shifts in the social fabric, it can’t hope to survive and thrive.

Funny, walking back after the second one, Karen said “I bet they get moans about an all white cast … again.” I disagree with the criticism.  As has been pointed out, the ethnic population of (e.g.) Southwark is in the high thirties percentage wise and plays at The Globe or NT or Old and Young Vic reflect that on stage, although not in the audiences. For the country as a whole it’s way lower, and we’re not in Central London’s South Bank theatre district. But is Kingston-upon-Thames really “regional”? I’m not sure it is. More a halfway house. In a given particular play which is about English history colour blindness has its limits.

Given known characters, who were painted at the time, Robert Walpole, Hogarth, Fielding, Queen Caroline (and in the sequel, Garrick and Horace Walpole) any “colour blindness” would tend to fall on the poor people roles (madams, prostitutes, murderers, servants) or on the vicious aristocrats, and that would get them even more stick. The director has made a valid choice for a single play. Not every production has to be PC, and this year in Greater London so many theatres have fallen over backwards to be so, that white male actors are the endangered species. Over the year as a whole, I’m sure ethnicities are fairly represented on London stages. Positive discrimination, or a cast who you envisage in the roles?  A complication is that it’s cast across the two plays, usually with a larger role in one than the other, so everyone gets to play a “negative” role (prostitute, rake, servant, murderess) as well as a positive / neutral one. I expect the director really was colour blind, and just cast a group of actors he thought would shine in the roles. And they all do.

****

The Taste of The Town

World premiere 2018

CAST:
Keith Allen – the older William Hogarth
Ruby Bentall – Nancy / Mrs Wyall
Emma Cunnife  – Mrs Colquhoun / Mrs Bascombe
Ben Deery – Zarachiah Blunt
Jack Derges – Parson Venables
Bryan Dick – Samuel
Ian Hallard – Horace Walpole
Susannah Harker- Jane Hogarth
Jasmine Jones – Bridget
Sylvestra le Touzel- Lady Thornhill
Mark Umbers – David Garrick

We meet William & Jane Hogarth thirty years on in Chiswick. Hogarth is now a major success. There IS mention of a pub crawl in one scene in this play, and Keith Allen as Hogarth gets royally drunk on grappa, but this play isn’t a pub crawl either.

The Taste of The Town is quite different in nature. There’s more comedy dialogue, less activity and it feels smoother and more conventional. The set relies almost entirely on projected images, without the screen revolving to reveal bedrooms as in The Art of Success. In the interval, I was standing next to a group of four who were agreeing they enjoyed it more than the earlier play. We did too, though there was less of the (admirable) theatricality of the first play, set changing and action. It was lighter, smoother, also slighter, but funnier.

Hogarth is 30 years older. Keith Allen, being the same height as Bryan Dick, and using the same accent and degree of effing and blinding, is immediately credible as him 30 years on,  though Jane (now Susannah Harker) has become taller. Physiology demonstrating a psychological truth?  He lives in Chiswick with Jane and her mother, Lady Thornhill (Sylvestra le Touzel). Lady Thornhill’s husband, Jane’s dad, was a noted painter of St Paul’s ceiling. A proper painter, not a caricaturist, as she points out.  They live with their two servants, Bridget (Jasmine Jones) and Samuel (Bryan Dick).

David Garrick (Mark Umbers) and William Hogarth (Keith Allen)

You felt it was written to location … it takes place along the same stretch of the River Thames as the Rose Theatre backs onto. That’s where the original people lived though. David Garrick, the actor manager, is now a major character. A couple of miles from Kingston, we paused in traffic outside Hampton Court walls, and there was a blue plaque opposite announcing that David Garrick lived there. Hogarth lived at Chiswick, further along the river towards London. Teddington and Kingston get mentioned.

Hogarth (Keith Allen) and David Garrick (Mark Umbers)

David Garrick & His Wife, by William Hogarth, 1757. Painted for Garrick, but he declined to buy it. Hogarth damaged it.

The play falls into a series of scenes … all funny. David Garrick (Mark Umbers) is dressed  as in the Hogarth portrait shown in the programme. He gets a run of up-himself theatrical in-jokes that had this audience roaring (but this audience had many recognizable  actors as well as critics). We get a lot on Garrick’s re-versioning of Shakespeare.

Garrick:  … I try to please my public? They love me because I give them what they want: great acting; nice frocks, the masterpieces of Shakespeare, Congreve, Johnson …
William:  Suitably rewritten …
Garrick … for the taste of the town.

So we get the title, and it refers to art too. Horace Walpole creates ‘the taste of the town’ in art. And at this point, both Hogarth and Garrick have been the toast of the town.

Hogarth (Keith Allen) and Zachariah Blunt (Ben Deery)

Garrick’s tour de force was when they meet the old soldier, Zachariah Blunt (Ben Deery), on their walk. Blunt tries to rob them, but is disabled after being stepped on by an elephant in India. Garrick offers to do his Macbeth (Garrick wrote his own dying scene) to prove who he is. It was a hilarious demonstration of 18th century actor manager hamming it up.

 

The tea shop: L to R: Mrs Wyall (Ruby Bentall), Mrs Colquhoun (Emma Cunnife), Jane Hogarth (Susannah Harker), Lady Thornhill (Sylvestra le Touzel)

Then there’s the London tea shop scene, where Jane Hogarth and Lady Thornhill meet two intellectual ladies, Mrs Colquhoun (Emma Cunnife) and Mrs Wyall (Ruby Bentall). Great comedy again. The two women are referred to as “blue stockings.” I thought that was a Victorian term, but I looked it up. Trust the playwright. The Blue Stocking Society was a literary society in the 1750s, founded by Elizabeth Montague.

Horace Walpole (Ian Hallard) and Hogarth (Keith Allen)

You do feel the play is falling into separate set pieces with 2, 3 or 4 actors.  Hogarth’s inspiration for the walk, and the running theme in the play, is his wish to confront the “taste maker” (see title) of London art, Horace Walpole. Walpole criticised Hogath’s Sigismunda and he is bent on confronting him. Garrick cries off the confrontation, which is a three way scene with Walpole (Ian Hallard plays the foppish effete Walpole brilliantly), and Mrs Bascombe (Emma Cunnife) his housekeeper with no education but strong views on art.

Walpole shows off by producing expensive and exotically Italian grappa. Keith Allen’s getting pissed on the fiery liquor is the best stage drunk scene I’ve seen in years. Ian Hallard gets a huge laugh from his delivery of just one word: “Chiswick.” You have to be there. Walpole and Hogarth bond in sentimental weeping over their recently deceased doggies … the cover of the play text is Hogarth’s self-portrait The Painter & His Pug. Hogarth’s dog, as we know earlier, was named Trump. An easy cheap laugh in 2018, and how many plays have squeezed a Trump joke in this year? OK, it can survive to the 30th anniversary in 2048 as “trump” can also appropriately mean “fart” in Britain, as I often point out to American friends. A farting dog is funny in itself. If you’re not in the room.

Hogarth (Keith Allen) and Nancy (Ruby Bentall)

Then there’s the Nancy prostitute scene, another two way dialogue, with a third person intervening (the soldier). This is written to the location (see above). As in the earlier play, Hogarth loses clothes, but not as many.  Such is our strong association with having seen her in the Poldark  TV series, and as with her earlier Jane Hogarth, it’s a surprise to see Ruby Bentall doing such a raunchy sexy scene. Very funny too. We have seen every Poldark episode. I guess Verity did run off with the sea captain. Hogarth encounters her as a prostitute on the towpath. It’s a screamingly funny scene, but look at their interchange:

William: You’re a girl of the game, Nance, are you?
Nancy: Something wrong with that?
William: No. Just don’t expect to find you lot round here. Seven Dials, Vauxhall … Kingston town on a Saturday night, pissing in the gutter with a pork chop in your hand …

It brought the Kingston house down, though it would be less amusing in Poole or Pontefract (though hopefully any director with sense would change Kingston to the town it’s playing in just for this line, though that loses the geographical continuity of the play’s setting in this area.) For the citizens of Kingston, we didn’t see anything remiss in public walking back to our hotel at 10.25, but I was once sick on Kingston bridge myself when I was eighteen due to alcohol.

The return to Chiswick introduces another character, Parson Venables (Jack Derges) sitting with Lady Cornhill’s corpse. It’s “ripe” in the warm weather.

A lot of jokes are based on art and theatre, so assume some knowledge. Not enough to spoil it though.

Sigismunda by Hogarth, 1759. Jane modelled for it. It received much technical criticism

Hogarth’s position in championing British art casts him rather like a British rock ‘n’ roller … one with an English London accent not an American one (e.g. Tommy Steele, Anthony Newley,  David Bowie, Ian Dury, Billy Bragg …). It’s far less raucous than the earlier play, but then he’s older.

Keith Allen as William Hogarth will be as good a lead role (5 stars) as we see this year, and Ian Hallard’s Walpole is as good a comic supporting role too (also *****).

Overall: ****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

The ratings are generally for both plays overall, though some liked one more than the other. Dominic Maxwell in The Times splits them, and we also liked The Taste Of The Town better.
5 star
John O’Brien, Londontheatre.com *****
4 star
Michael Billington, Guardian ****
Debbie Gilpin, Broadway World  ****
The Taste of The Town, Dominic Maxwell, The Times ****
3 star
Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard ***
The Art of Success Dominic Maxwell, The Times ***
The Taste of The Town, Stephen Bates, Reviews Hub, ***
2 star
Tim Bano, The Stage **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG:

NICK DEAR
Dedication – Shakespeare and Southampton by Nick Dear, Nuffield Southampton

BRYAN DICK
The Two Noble Kinsmen, Globe 2018
Hobson’s Choice, Bath 2016

KEITH ALLEN
The Homecoming, Trafalgar Studios 2015

SYLVESTRA LE TOUZEL
The Merry Wives of Windsor, RSC 2012 (Mistress Page)
Mr Turner (FILM)

EMMA CUNNIFE
Queen Anne, RSC 2015 (Queen Anne)

BEN DEERY
A Mad World My Masters, RSC 2013