Theatre review: Vincent in Brixton

Nicholas Wright's 2002 play Vincent in Brixton is a work of fiction, but it does have its basis in a few interesting facts, for example that before becoming an artist himself, Vincent van Gogh worked as an art dealer - an ironic job for someone whose own paintings would fail to sell during his lifetime, before becoming among the most valuable in the world after his death. In 1873 he was briefly transfered to the London office, and the play begins with him walking all the way from Greenwich, where he was staying, to Brixton, where he'd found a church close enough to the strict and stark Dutch Reform tradition he'd been raised in. Vincent (Jeroen Frank Kales) then takes a room at a local house, officially to live closer to his church of choice - but he's really picked it because he's spotted the landlady's daughter Eugenie (Ayesha Ostler) and decided he's fallen in love at first sight.

But Eugenie is already in a secret relationship with the other lodger, Sam Plowman (Rawaed Asde,) himself an aspiring artist who makes a living as a painter and decorator, and who believes art belongs to everyone, and should not be bought and sold.

But Vincent's most important relationship will end up being not with Eugenie or her boyfriend, but with her mother: Landlady Ursula Loyer (Niamh Cusack) still wears mourning black 15 years after being widowed, and the other residents make oblique references to her having much darker days than Vincent's seen from her so far. She and the young man whose own mental health problems would become as famous as his art find a connection in recognising each other's darkness, that turns into a romantic relationship.

Wright's play is a gently funny and sad story that feels, in Georgia Green's production, like a painting itself, a scene (in Charlotte Henery's design of a working Victorian kitchen) of people's lives intersecting that gives us a few clues to what's happening but also leaves a lot of space to fill in the blanks. Particularly, given that Vincent's life is so well-known, we can see sad echoes of some of the tragic events that followed for the man Kales makes a likeable little eccentric, whose naïve and narrow outlook on the world is widened by Mrs Loyer's quietly radical household. There's real warmth between him and the always-excellent Cusack as a woman whose life seems to be have been given an unexpected second act.

But in the play's actual second act we get the arrival of another lodger in the form of Vincent's sister Anna (Amber van der Brugge,) at first an amusingly brisk and blunt figure but increasingly seeming like a true villain in the way she cuts down everything that's come to matter both to her brother and everyone around him. Given the significance attached to the kitchen table, and Ursula's having buffed down the wood to find beauty in something rustic and practical, Anna's insistence on finding a tablecloth for it feels almost like an act of violence.

Inevitably we get references to some of van Gogh's most famous works, and while there is an actual sketch of Ursula that becomes a plot point, Wright mostly paints her as a muse in a different way, her description of the coexistence of light and darkness in particular becoming an obvious inspiration for "The Starry Night."

I had a few reservations about the play - Asde's Sam is so charming and flirtatious it feels like there's an underdeveloped story there about how loyal he actually is to Eugenie, and the jumps in and out of the story are quire abrupt. But seeing the play as a snapshot or painting rather than a conventional narrative helped with the latter, and there's a lot to take away from this warmly melancholy look into what may have contributed to a very famous talent.

Vincent in Brixton by Nicholas Wright is booking until the 18th of April at the Orange Tree Theatre (returns and rush tickets only.)

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.