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Arcola, London
Published in 1751 for distribution among London's lower orders, William Hogarth's illustrations of the Four Stages of Cruelty contained a blunt moral message: don't stick an arrow up a dog's bottom, because it's bound to end in tears. Tom Nero, the boy who executes this wicked deed in the first frame, degenerates from the beating of beasts to the murder of humans; finally he is hanged at Tyburn and, with malicious irony, his heart is gnawed by a dog. As depicted by Hogarth, Nero's features are so warped by evil (Oscar Wilde might have had this image in mind when describing the twisted picture of Dorian Gray) that sympathy with this devil is nigh impossible.
That is not the case with the fully fleshed portrait of Nero presented by co-writers/directors Adam Brace and Sebastian Armesto in this lively story spun from Hogarth's images. Played with furious verve by Richard Maxted, Nero is an ambiguous antihero: an orphan who experienced no care as a child, and so never learned to care for anyone else. Desperate to escape poverty, he takes dead-end job after dead-end job, only to see his ambitions thwarted by ill luck or the selfishness and greed of others. It is a dog-eat-dog world – and the quiet subtext of the production is that little has changed.
Armesto's theatre company, simple8, conjure up this dirty, violent world with a few stained sheets and some ingenious props: a concertina becomes a puppet dog, a ukulele case and a belt strap form a horse's head. These transformations are so engaging, you wish for more – for the production to be less visually spare. Still, the text and acting are scrupulously detailed, while the soundtrack (provided by the actors themselves) of scraped violin and keening accordion induces the queasiness Hogarth intended.
