The Line tells the true story of the friendship between Edgar Degas and Suzanne Valadon. Suzanne, a trapeze artist turned model turned painter, met Degas in the 1880s, at her own insistence and thanks to her many intellectual acquaintances. She was in her early twenties, and she had a son and no real job. He was almost in his fifties, an affirmed and slightly misanthropic artist. Degas was impressed by her style, and Valadon became his pupil. She would remain his friend and disciple until his death, through alternative phases of intimacy and respect, including a period of abandonment when she temporarily gave up her scandalous lifestyle to marry a banker so that he could provide an education for her son - a son who, in passing, would become the painter Maurice Utrillo.

Valadon and Degas were profoundly different from almost any point of view, hence the fascination with the idea of their friendship. He was already famous when he met her, a respectable, well-off bourgeois man who confided only in his governess - the third central character of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, Zoe Clozier -, and who could not stand most of the artists from the younger generation. She was a single mother who had been seducing most of the intelligentsia of her time, including, among many others, Toulouse-Lautrec and Eric Satie. Their profound distance and the friendship that they nurtured in spite of it are, in a nutshell, the spark that should set this production going.

Unfortunately, Suzanne and Edgar never move quite beyond this foundation point. He is all about work and she is all about life, and throughout the evening they keep drawing concentric circles around this core difference, returning to the same shouted scenes of apparent, but never actual finality every few years. Matthew Lloyd’s direction highlights this as even their positions within the physical space of the room seem to become repetitive. Degas is a rational man and he believes in discipline and rigor and tradition; Valadon is an instinctive woman and she believes in love and passion and originality. He wants her to draw, she wants to paint. He wants her to listen to him, and she wants to have fun and be bohemian. Both characters are buried under the points of view they represent.

In imagining that Valadon would be the torch-bearer of lust for life and unconventionality in art, and Degas would be the defender of dedication to work and respect for the tradition, Wertenbaker not only adheres to a tired cliché about gender, but also forces upon her characters a set of values and attitudes that belong very specifically to us: the same contemporary audience that draws parallels between Romantic poets and the 1960s, and imagines the Pre-Raphaelites as a congregation of scruffy indie kids.  Using these colonised characters, the play insists on teaching us history lessons, mixing frequent witticisms (did Degas have a maxim for every occasion?) with the attempt to refer to every major moment of the end of the 19th century, from the invention of gelatin plates for photography to the Dreyfus affair, complete with annexed article by Zola.

Henry Goodman as Degas is energetic and tender, but he has a very hard time building the emotional momentum because he is so busy exposing opinions. Sarah Smart’s Suzanne never seems to convincingly grow up or evolve, with the result that she is far less impressive and prodigious than she needs to be: Valadon is a woman who was brought up by a poor, alcoholic mother and no father,  who went on to live one of the most exciting lives of her century, and whose name might be a household item today if she had not been a woman and she had not had a child and she were not mainly remembered as someone’s lover.

By the end of this long, overdrawn production, the idea that seemed promising in the beginning feels as faded and overexposed as the fatigued and hyper-recognisable paintings of ballerinas and women getting out of bathtubs that surround William Dudley’s set. 

Till 12 December 2009