Nicholas Wright has convincingly imagined himself into the life of the 20-year-old Vincent Van Gogh and written a fascinating, if over-long, play that tries to unravel the mystery of what really happened to the future artist during his 1874 sojourn with a south London teacher.
Vincent in Brixton, in which the riveting, red-headed Dutch actor Jochum ten Haaf quietly seethes with ardour and intensity as an inscrutable Van Gogh, relies upon impure speculation,with a little help from the artist's letters, his biographers and plenty of sensational theorising. Yet the play that emerges in Richard Eyre's superlative production is both less and more than a portrait of the fledgling artist as a randy, young man. It's about unconventional love in a conformist climate and the culture of family secrecy. It deals with the clash between liberal Victorian agnosticism and repressed Dutch Calvinism, with the ruthless egotism all artists need.
Essentially, though, Vincent in Brixton puts the painter second. It's a dramatic post-script to those 19th century novels about disappointed or unfulfilled women destroyed by love. In the beginning, Victorian kitchen-sink and running-water realism is meticulously arranged. Designer Tim Hatley has created a traverse stage, with audiences peering down at a functional Victorian kitchen, where Clare Higgins's woebegone, widowed Ursula, who runs a preparatory school, is cooking an authentic dinner.
When Haaf's Van Gogh, an aspirant artist, arrives in search of a lodging place, it's not long before he casts blushing glances at Ursula's daughter Eugenie. Haaf, who has that rare Scandinavian actors' facility for being pent-up and extrovert all at once, proves able to blush at the drop of a hat. But since it eventually transpires Eugenie is secretly fixed up with another tenant, Paul Nicholls's jocular would-be artist, Vincent's attention is eventually transferred to crisp, cool Ursula. They face each other at opposite ends of a long table. There's no scene more beautiful or affecting on the London stage than this unusual wooing. "I love your age. I love your unhappiness," the religious Vincent says. The wonderful, wilting Higgins, sheds her grey aura,
The unexplained end of the affair, precipitated by the arrival of Vincent's
inquisitive sister Anna (raucous Emma Handy must be drastically toned down) leaves Ursula to decline. Miss Higgins eloquently conveys a sense of this process with a blank, bereft air of desolation. Despair shrivels her like a frost. When Vincent return to visit two years later and a dejected Ursula confesses her governing wish to "be the cause of something remarkable", there's a final touch of dramatic irony that suggests she indeed will be. An evening to savour.
Vincent In Brixton
