Reclining Nude with Black Stockings at Arcola Theatre

Reclining Nude with Black Stockings at Arcola Theatre

13 September, 2010
by: Tom Jeffreys

Art, sex, humour and full frontal nudity: Tom Jeffreys is completely won over by a new play about the life of Egon Schiele.

Hackney; a tiny 60-seater studio theatre; a new play about tortured Austrian painter Egon Schiele; full-frontal nudity; alleged paedophilia. You'd think Reclining Nude with Black Stockings, currently running in Studio 2 at the Arcola Theatre, would be terrible – a tangled mass of too-clever-by-half, posturing angst – but it's not. Or rather, it sort of is, but it works brilliantly.

The masterstroke is that the play is genuinely very funny. Obviously much of the credit for this must go to Snoo Wilson's script, which is sharply ironic, but the structure of the piece is important too. The action and tone are introduced by Schiele's mentor, the great Gustav Klimt (an imposing, toga-wearing Johannes Flaschberger, with massive hands and dancing eyes) who addresses the audience as if we're Athenian jurors. This framing device – and Klimt's occasional interventions – serve two main purposes: firstly, it wins over the audience with easy, knowing flattery; and secondly, it serves to render Schiele ridiculous. This is the key: Schiele's arrogance, selfishness, impatience and barely contained ambition are never fully endorsed by the play. We are never completely embroiled in the artist's self-obsession.

That's not to say that Schiele is completely dreadful. The play concerns his rise to prominence as a major artistic force, his relationships with his beautiful (and often very young) female muses, and his infamous trial for allegedly seducing a girl below the age of consent. The play's emotional apex comes as the judge, despite acknowledging the artist's innocence, nonetheless burns one of Schiele's paintings in front of him. The sense of outrage at the actions of such impenetrable Kafkaesque authorities is palpable. Schiele is the victim, and we share his pain. But of course he knows it. His reaction upon being released – “I own this experience” – is hilarious and ghastly and real.

In a theatre as small as this – with the audience inches from the cast – there is nowhere to hide, and the performances are uniformly superb. Simon Harrison excels as the tortured Schiller – all self-conscious, moody, shabbily dapper and stiffly magnetic. Katie McGuinness is excellent as Valerie “Wally” Neuzil, by turns admirably empowered and dangerously vulnerable. Naomi Sheldon also makes a wonderfully manipulative nymphet.

The language throughout neatly flits from ancient Greece to the modern day, whilst also remaining rooted to the specificity of Schiele's Vienna, with its poverty, decadence, and imminent emergence of Adolf Hitler. Reclining Nude with Black Stockings is tense, claustrophobic, sultry and provocative, but also lightly handled, wry and funny: a taught tightrope, delicately trod.

Reclining Nude with Black Stockings is at Arcola Theatre until 2nd October 2010. 

Click here for Theatre in London
Click here for things to do in London

Tom Jeffreys