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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