Reclining Nude with Black Stockings by Snoo Wilson – Arcola Theatre ***

Powerful male artists with vulnerable women in their thrall seem to be a recurrent theme of productions at the Arcola. Earlier in the year, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Line portrayed a curmudgeonly Degas and his relationship with his protégé, Susan, and housemaid, Zoe. Wilson’s is a much shorter and more intense work, delving into the erotic passions which drove Egon Schiele to create his iconic nude paintings.

The charming but bumbling Johannes Flaschberger is our narrator, appearing in the form of Gustav Klimt but addressing us, the audience, as Athenians in order to suggest some kind of parallel with Greek tragedy. Shiele, although not all that dissimilar to the tragic hero beating his breast at the cruelty and inexorability of his fate, he is no mere plaything of the Gods, without volition of his own. He may make pronouncements of innocence and non-culpability but by painting his provocative nudes and carrying on a dalliance with numerous women and models, Schiele is setting himself up for trouble in the eyes of Viennese polite society. To Klimt and his muse, Valerie, he is a tortured genius, but to the police and society at large, he is a deranged and perverted egomaniac. In a Kafkaesque trial scene, Schiele’s artwork is set alight, Valerie finds herself in a catch 22 situation when denying her madness but affirming her involvement in and appreciation of Schiele’s art, and Schiele is condemned on a trumped up charge of rape.

The play is well done and the parts of Valerie and Schiele’s young model are performed passionately by Katie McGuinness and Naomi Sheldon respectively. The Arcola’s Studio 2 is a tiny space which makes the moments of full frontal nudity brave and intimate which, in the context of the play, do not feel gratuitous or titillating. But the play doesn’t please on all fronts; Simon Harrison’s Schiele was enigmatic, sometimes emotionally cold and even inhuman in his betrayal of Valerie, so why the lack of interrogation in respect of the rape charge. We are expected to fall into line with the view that Schiele is being defamed by an ultra-conservative state out to crush his artistic expression. But Schiele is played as a rather distasteful man, for all his genius, who uses and then discards the women he encounters. For this play to feel like more of an examination of Schiele, his art and his passions, we need a more nuanced approach to the central problem of the rape charge and less of Klimt the narrator and his distracting stage business.

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Story of a Rabbit by Hugh Hughes (Shôn Dale-Jones) – The Pit, Barbican *****

Alongside the quietly enigmatic Dafydd Williams, Hugh Hughes delivers a spell-binding show which plumbs the depths of loss and bereavement but at the same time is peculiarly uplifting and life-affirming. Hughes’ project here, according to the programme, is to share his wonderful world with us, and he certainly has a unique insight which is both charming and childlike, especially in the way he marvels at the quotidian (for instance, the number of potato particles in a potato). Telling two stories of death in parallel, his father’s and the next-door-neighbour’s rabbit’s, Hughes gives us an incredibly moving insight into the experiences that can shape an individual; Hughes is at once separate from our own lives and, for the short duration of the show, entirely part of us.

Hughes is a mischievous sprite of a man who wavers between a heartbroken son coming to terms with his father’s death and a stand-up comedian who knows exactly how to exploit his material for laughs. He immediately engages his audience, in a way that could be termed meta-theatrical if it wasn’t for the fact that his self-consciousness is evoked entirely to poke fun at the very approach to theatre that would employ such terms. Indeed, he warns us that throughout the performance he will be using dance and movement to express himself then later proceeds to display an especially peculiar routine which he tells us he conceived during a workshop in Bulgaria, funded by the Arts Council. As the show begins, the lights are up in the studio space and he addresses the audience directly. He offers a cup of tea to one lucky member of the audience, identified by having a ‘T’ written on the back of his ticket, and a second cup of tea (‘EA’ on the ticket this time) is offered later on in the show which serves as a disarming interlude when the narrative reaches its emotional peak. And the performance follows this trajectory throughout; Hughes is excited by the shear wonder of the universe and his place in it, he concentrates on the pathos of his father’s death and then switches to the relative light-relief of the rabbit’s death, then, when it all gets rather morose and Dafydd’s haunting melodies are bringing the tempo down, Hughes bursts through with an unexpected sideline accompanied by Dafydd on the banjo.

Hughes brings infectious energy and touching insight to his show. He greets everyone individually, shaking their hand, as they enter the auditorium, then does the same and hands out badges at the end. This sounds gimmicky but the audience thoroughly enjoyed this unusual intimacy. Hughes was, after all, sharing a deeply personal moment with us, the moment of his father’s death, and it would have been an inferior and colder experience if Hughes had maintained the conventional distance between performer and audience. Story of a Rabbit is one of the most enjoyable performances I have experienced this year because Hughes doesn’t pretend – he is not an actor in the usual sense, this is his story and he plays in a space that is littered with the objects and paraphernalia belonging to his life. The genius of the piece is that we are asked to share in this experience and shown how it can affect us, and amazingly the audience forgets its English reticence and fully engages with the loveable Hughes.

The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes, currently playing at the Barbican, consists of three performance pieces: Floating, Story of a Rabbit, and 360.

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