Hogarth's Progress review – dazzling double bill charts artist's path to woe

Rose theatre, Kingston
Keith Allen excels as the embittered old painter in the second of Nick Dear’s two plays following the life of William Hogarth

There is a palpable irony to the umbrella title of Nick Dear’s two plays about William Hogarth. The Art of Success, originally staged by the RSC in 1986, offers a rumbustious portrait of the artist as a young man in his creative heyday. The new piece, The Taste of the Town, is a more sombre, reflective work showing Hogarth as an embittered oldster. Even though I preferred the dash and spirit of the first play, the two works offer an intriguing insight into the true nature of Hogarth’s genius.

Hogarth was supremely a social painter and London was his canvas. That comes across with abundant clarity in The Art of Success, set in the 1730s. Hogarth, rejoicing in the acclaim for A Harlot’s Progress, is a wildly clubbable figure and, although newly married to Jane Thornhill, an enthusiastic patron of the city’s night workers. But Dear also highlights the paradoxes within Hogarth. Angry at seeing his work pirated, he champions the new copyright laws introduced by Sir Robert Walpole. At the same time, when Hogarth portrays a murderess on the eve of her execution, he finds she is the one who violently protects exploitation of her image.

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