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This page contains all the news on Paul's last theatre project, the award-winning National Theatre producton Vincent in Brixton. After an incredible run at the NT, it transferred to London's West End and has now crossed the ocean to wow American audiences on Broadway ... though, sadly, without Paul 
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Based on the true facts of Vincent van Gogh's early life in London and about the transforming effects of love, sex and artistic adventure on unformed talent, and traces the birth of genius. Brixton, 1873.
A brash young Dutchman, working for the London branch of an international firm of art-dealers, rents a room in the house of an English widow. Three years later, he returns to Europe on the first step of a journey which will end in breakdown, death and immortality.
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Clare & Jochum: 
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These are snippets from reviews of Paul's first full National Theatre performance. If you have subscribed to our Greeny club, you can get the full text of these reviews in the message archives.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
THE Vincent of Nicholas Wright's intelligent, sensitive new play is Van Gogh. Brixton is where he lodged in 1873, when he was the erratic employee of the London branch of a firm of international art-dealers, and where he developed an intense, unrequited love for his landlady's daughter. So much we know from the biographers, but there's clearly much more to be guessed at or discovered about Vincent's life in Sin City and especially in what his pious mother disapprovingly called "that house of secrets" in SW9.
As Richard Eyre's careful production suggests, it's a little as if Candide had blundered into a play by Pinter. All seems at peace on a tiny traverse-stage that's comfortingly furnished with a real stove and real sink where real saucepans can boil and be washed up.
But the daughter of the house, Emily Blunt's trim young Eugenie, is having an affair with the other lodger, Paul Nicholls's jaunty, genial Sam. And though Jochum Ten Haaf's gauche Vincent at first decides that he's desperately in love with her, he's soon falling for her mother, Clare Higgins's Ursula, who wears widow's weeds and is in mourning for her life.
Ten Haaf's pallor and tufty ginger hair and beard don't only make him look uncannily like the Van Gogh of legend and portraiture. There were times when I wondered if I wasn't watching some chunky, hirsute troll stumbled out of one of Breughel's studies of the peasantry. This gifted young Dutch actor certainly catches the character's earnestness and melancholy. What's lacking, maybe, is quite the power and intensity demanded by such lines as "I've so much energy I'll burst", and (behind his back) "He's a very stormy fellow".
Still, he's always watchable and doesn't fall into the trap customary in plays about fierce, repressed geniuses. He doesn't spuriously fizz or blaze. And that's no bad thing, for the perfectly valid point Wright is making about the young Van Gogh is that he hadn't the faintest clue he was Van Gogh. Only at the very end, when he starts purposefully drawing a pair of boots, does he seem fully to realise that he may not be as lacking in artistic talent as he has all along claimed.
Indeed, the play is mainly about the meeting of two lost creatures. The nervy, gangling Van Gogh is in search of his own true gifts. The depressive Ursula sees no purpose in her life beyond that of discovering and nurturing the gifted.
The irony is that the man she wants to nurture is Sam, a follower of William Morris with a small and somewhat conventional talent for drawing. Though Van Gogh's exit from Brixton plunges Higgins's Ursula from the dumps into the doldrums, how could she imagine that this awkward, unformed Dutch boy would one day reinvent painting? The play is packed with quiet irony — we find Van Gogh, who was to shoot himself, gratuitously warning Ursula against suicide — and with gentle humour. The arrival of Vincent's sister, in Emma Handy's performance a busybodying hausfrau avid to clean everything from floors to lives, adds comedy to what is, at root, a pretty grave play. We know Van Gogh will bloom, but what will be Ursula's fate? To see Higgins's memorably huddled body and touchingly wan face is to know the worst.
Reviewer's Rating: 
This is Nicholas Wright's best play, and one of the best new plays ever presented by the National Theatre.
It contains a magnetic performance by the Dutch actor Jochum Ten Haaf playing the 20-year-old Van Gogh, newly arrived in London as an art dealer. Haaf radiates an intense, awkward sincerity, which is self-deprecating but arrogant: the sincerity of the inexperienced who cannot help exposing their vulnerability. Vincent is odd the way the young are odd when they want to be accepted, but half expect to be rejected.
The arrival of his sister Anna (a virtuoso portrayal of a priggish, prudish busy-body by Emma Handy) brilliantly suggests how Vincent's family had nourished his sense of being an outcast.
Vincent has taken lodgings with a Mrs Loyer in Brixton, and he thinks he has fallen in love with her daughter Eugenie (a touchingly innocent-wise performance by Emily Blunt). But, more and more, it is her mother Ursula, beautifully played by Clare Higgins, looking a little like Van Gogh's L'arlesienne, with a sense of wistful but intense sensuality and painful pride, who comes into focus. She is a widow, both earthy and dreamy. Her ambition is to make other people creative; but Wright is suggesting, I think, that Vincent senses in her a tormented fellow spirit, who, like him, expects a subconsciously longed for unhappiness.
This is a play about an artist's escape into himself and the price he and others pay for it. The fear of both success and failure, which characterised Van Gogh's life, is taking shape.
Richard Eyre's direction has a ruthless but loving sense of observation. At the end, Vincent is seen withdrawn into the no man's land of his self, totally absorbed in what will be a sketch for his famous painting of his boots. An artist is born, on his way to an immortality that would have terrified him.
England is a country where an astonishing array of international luminaries (from Nijinsky to Simone Weil) have wound up dying. Fewer famous foreigners have cut their teeth here. An exception is Vincent van Gogh who, in 1873 at the age of 20, was sent from Holland to the London branch of a firm of art dealers.
At that stage, though, there were few signs that this man would become an artistic genius. Premiered now in Richard Eyre's intimate and beautifully acted production in the Cottesloe, Nicholas Wright's subtle, insightful new play focuses on the Vincent who, newly arrived in this country, had yet to find his true vocation.
It's on record that Vincent lodged in Brixton with a schoolteaching widow, Ursula Loyer and that he developed a crushing unrequited passion for the latter's daughter, Eugene. Supplementing and readjusting this bald scenario with imaginative speculation, the play offers an intriguing alternative portrait of the artist as a young man and suggests ways in which some of the seeds of his future growth may have been sown here.
Jochum ten Haaf is superbly funny and moving as the naive, outspoken, and rather absurd newcomer who, in this version, finds himself in a tragicomic predicament. Sworn to silence over his physical infatuation with the daughter, he discovers a strong mental affinity with the mother who has held him to this pledge. Played in a performance of remarkable empathy by Claire Higgins, Ursula is tough-minded but a depressive, whose condition allows her flashes of visionary perception. In her, Vincent finds a mirror and eventually, after a scene of touching tentativeness, a lover.
One of the virtues of the play is that it doesn't pretend that inspiration works immediately or in a straight line. For example, Ursula's gift to Vincent initially leads him, to her enraged disappointment, into eschewing art and embarking on the ministry of Christ. It's only at the very end of the piece that we see a way in which these two urges in him might creatively coalesce. On a set of almost Dutch realism, there's genuine cooking as Sunday lunch is prepared. The central relationship is buffeted by other economically sketched-in characters in flurries of adroitly dramatised awkwardness.
Paul Nicholls offers a sympathetic portrait of Ursula's well-meaning working-class son-in-law whose scholarship-boy artistic aspirations are blighted by witnessing Vincent's superior powers. And Emma Handy is hilariously grating as Vincent's younger sister, a fanatical hygiene-freak who.
In movies, Van Gogh has featured as the clichéd epitome of the tortured genius, or victim par excellence of the conflict between art and commerce. Steadfastly avoiding all melodrama, Vincent in Brixton shows us that genius in gestation.
But Nicholas Wright's excellent play about Van Gogh's early years in London not only avoids the usual lust-for-lifery but offers a wholly believable portrait of the disruptive nature of artistic talent.
Wright weaves an intriguing scenario in which the young Vincent, while lodging with a widowed teacher and her daughter in Brixton, discovers a house filled with secrets. Vincent, in falling first for the daughter and then the mother, is drawn into the household's web of duplicity.
... what Wright memorably shows is the raw, ruthless nature of the young Vincent. On one level he is naive, tactless and comically direct: at another level he displays the instinctive arrogance of talent.
He peels the spuds, digs the garden and with a virginal innocence shifts his affections from the daughter to the mother; yet he is also quietly scathing about the journeyman daubs of his fellow lodger.
Wright offers us a brilliant portrait of the artist as a young man: possessed of the symptoms of genius but with nothing as yet to confirm it.
The play also gets an exceptionally fine production from Richard Eyre which places as much stress on the secrets and lies of a progressive English household as on the cataclysmic effect of the Dutch intruder.
The acting also matches the writing. Jochum Ten Haaf's Vincent has a perfect red-haired rawboned intensity. Clare Higgins invests the widowed teacher with a repressed sensuality that evokes the great Anna Magnani.
And there is exemplary support from Emma Handy as Vincent's eccentrically intrusive sister and Paul Nicholls as the artistically aspiring fellow lodger.
Forget Kirk Douglas as the jaw-jutting screen Van Gogh. Wright and company give us the artist as he genuinely might have been.
Reviewer's Rating:
Portrait of the artist as a young lodger
With the new play Vincent in Brixton, you can feel a glow all around the Cottesloe Theatre. Nicholas Wright has written an enthralling play, Clare Higgins is back at the National, acting beautifully, and Richard Eyre is back directing, on top form. Not that Vincent In Brixton is truly a great play. But I loved it, and more so as it proceeded.
The play covers a mysterious period in Van Gogh's life: his 1873-74 visit to London as a well-paid young art dealer, and his 1876 return as an unpaid schoolmaster. It begins mildly enough. Mr Vincent - he calls himself that because it is such torture for him to hear how the English mispronounce "Van Gogh" - takes lodgings in Brixton with a widow, Mrs Ursula Loyer.
I hardly want even to hint at how the plot develops; but Vincent works on several levels. It's about a pivotal and bumpy stage in Van Gogh's self-discovery as an artist. It's about alternative values: Van Gogh begins to unlearn the Dutch Christian zeal of his upbringing in this permissive and progressive Brixton household. And it's about love - about how love, an artist's love for his model intersects with her role both as a muse-like source of inspiration and as a stern editor leading him back to his truest artistic instincts.
The play's first and final scenes feature four characters: Vincent, Ursula Loyer, her lovely daughter Eugenie, and Sam Plowman, the household's other lodger and a painter himself. The relationships between all four are very touching. The play ends with a single image of hope and progress in one couple and a contrasting image of complacency and frustration in another, and the calm intersection of these two images, with all four around the same kitchen table, is hauntingly expressive.
And Wright has the skill to introduce a fifth character just when we need one - at the start of Act Two: Anna van Gogh, Vincent's young sister, very Dutch, very Christian, very repressed, and very intrusive. With her thick accent and her endless need to improve the domestic arrangements of the household, she's a gloriously ludicrous figure until, quite seamlessly, she becomes not funny but exceptionally irritating and a serious threat both to the idyllic menage and to Vincent's own advance. This is a superb scene, and Wright has so fully reimagined his characters that he gives the most disturbing line of the scene not to Anna but to Ursula, who in a single sentence tells Vincent what his latest drawings are lacking (namely, the feeling in his heart).
Every least feature of Tim Hatley's designs is superb: the chairs, the aprons, the table. And Eyre's production is just about perfect. Maybe I don't quite believe the precise brand of Cockney that Paul Nicholls adopts as Sam, but I feel very tenderly about everything else. Jochum ten Haaf is so right for Vincent that one wonders if he will ever again find a role so becoming; Emma Handy is breathtakingly vivid and real as his sister Anna; Emily Blunt brings real bloom and a quiet range of feminine emotion to the role of Eugenie; and Nicholls makes Sam as cheerful and lovable as a supporting character in a Dickens novel.
Clare Higgins, one of Britain's greatest actors, shows aspects of herself I'd never seen before as Ursula Loyer: her very voice has a hushed, musical grace that lead us irresistibly into the most affecting passages of the play. Yet how complex this seemingly simple character becomes in her hands: I was thunderstruck by her talent for brooding, black depression, by her teacherly desire to find talent and to help it fulfil itself, and by her womanly conflict of feeling about love and despair. Just to recall this role, and her performance, is deeply moving.
As is proved by Eyre's inspired production of Nicholas Wright's new play, an imaginative version of the time Van Gogh spent in London, before dedicating himself to painting. Vincent in Brixton - set in the period when the painter was work ing as an art-dealer, and preaching rather than painting - has the outline of a love-story, and a secret undertow. The artist, lodging in the house of a widowed schoolteacher, falls for her daughter, but finding her affections engaged, discovers an affinity with his landlady: both of them suffer from depression; their worlds are always tilting into the dark.
Vincent in Brixton sounds like England (church bells and rain), and looks, in Tim Hatley's meticulous, realistic design, like a nineteenth-century kitchen, with an old range and colanders, and a wicker-seated wood chair (the empty chair that Van Gogh was to commemorate). But the production's slow-burning fever and tight focus (the action is often enclosed by the soft dip of light from an oil lamp) are those of Dutch interiors.
Melancholy interiors. The strength of Wright's skilful play is that it comes at its famous subject obliquely. He avoids the usual pitfalls of plays about artists. He doesn't show the painter's daubs and exclaim about his genius. He doesn't allow anyone to girn on about the toil of composition. He doesn't do temperament. What he demonstrates is the single-minded passion of the creator, and the casual disregard of anyone who gets in his way.
This is the artist as autist. His gifts and liabilities are communicated by the young Dutch actor Jochum Ten Haaf with exemplary frankness. It's as if he isn't performing, just being. He's stiff but formidably energetic: he burns on the spot. He's always picking up things that are too hot, singing too loudly, speaking too frankly, seeing too clearly. He wears his social inappropriateness like a badge of artistic talent. The only person who reads this badge is his lover.
Anyone who needs to be convinced that Clare Higgins is a major actor should see this. She belongs to a group of women actors who are much admired and insufficiently lauded: concentrated but not furrowed, who can suggest intelligence by a crook of the elbow. Eileen Atkins is the founder member; Penelope Wilton is a major subscriber.
Wright's most cogent speeches - snapshots of the landscape of depression - are given to Higgins, and she delivers them with a clarity that is steely and silvery. 'It starts with something small and it becomes about everything,' she says of her black attacks. It's a description that could stand for the way in which she makes a character. With an impressive stillness. Where a lesser actor would emote, Higgins freezes, and allows an expression to thaw out one feature at a time. You can tell she's being seduced because she lifts an eyebrow.
Portrait of the artist as a troubled young man
In this fascinating, funny and sometimes deeply moving new play ... Nicholas Wright offers a portrait of the artist as a young man. At the age of 20, Van Gogh came from Holland to London to work as a trainee art dealer. The later wild visionary was then a respectable - if socially awkward - young man, following in the middle-class family tradition.
Wright's play imagines what happened in Brixton. He lodged with a family called the Loyers, and there is evidence that something dramatic occurred. After he and his sister Anna abruptly left the Brixton household, Vincent's mother wrote: "Since the summer he has been abnormal. The secrets of the Loyers did him no good."
Wright concedes that his play goes much further than any biographer could in interpreting the fragments of evidence about Van Gogh's English years, but his play is both persuasive and touching, and in Richard Eyre's beautifully acted production in the Cottesloe Theatre it comes over as the theatrical equivalent of a satisfyingly detailed genre painting.
The young Vincent - naive, gauche, disarmingly frank and superbly played by the Dutch actor Jochum Ten Haaf - initially falls in love with the daughter of the house, Eugenie, only belatedly to realise that she is embarked on an affair with his fellow lodger, Sam Plowman. Then he transfers his affections to the widowed mother, who runs a small prep school. In a scene of remarkable tenderness and emotional honesty, we watch as this much older woman, a victim of depression magnificently played by Clare Higgins, awakes to the miraculous possibility of happiness with her strange and strangely empathetic lodger.
Anyone who knows anything about Van Gogh's life will guess that the happiness doesn't last long. Van Gogh's sister is sent over to spy on her brother and is appalled by what she discovers. In a deeply painful final scene, we learn just how much the doomed affair has cost the two lovers, though there is a strong suggestion that Van Gogh may also have been enriched by it.
The play is often beguilingly funny. Ten Haaf blunders round Tim Hatley's meticulously designed kitchen (where real lamb roasts in the oven) like a red-haired bull in a china shop, while his prudish, prying, hygiene-obsessed sister, hilariously played by Emma Handy, almost tips the piece into farce.
Yet what Wright and the remarkable Ten Haaf also capture is the raw openness and honesty of Van Gogh - which shines throughout his letters to his brother Theo - and the awakening of an artist's sensibility.
This is biodrama of a high order, offering laughter, artistic understanding and a deeply sympathetic insight into what has been described as "malignant sadness". Van Gogh would surely have recognised Wright's compelling theatrical portrait.
Portrait of the artist as a lodger
If one wanted to be pedantic, Nicholas Wright's Vincent in Brixton should be entitled "Vincent in Stockwell". Hackford Road, where Van Gogh lodged with a Mrs Loyer in the mid-1870s, sits firmly in SW9, not SW2. But Brixton somehow offers more poetic resonance, and Wright is surely entitled to his liberty, since this play makes no claim to reconstruct actual events. It could scarcely do so, as almost nothing is known of this episode in the artist's life beyond a remark in one of his mother's letters that life at 87 Hackford Road made Vincent "abnormal" and that "the secrets at the Loyers did him no good".
Around this enigma, Wright skilfully weaves an absorbing and plausible fantasy. Mrs Loyer is imagined to be an Ibsenian widow "with progressive views", who runs a preparatory school. She also has a beautiful daughter and another lodger, who works as a decorator. Van Gogh, apprenticed to an art gallery selling etchings and photogravure, is earnest and dangerously naive. He asks awkward questions, articulates his deepest feelings and embarrassingly ignores the English tendency to conceal and evade.
The ensuing drama is carefully developed and gentle in tone. It doesn't dig very deep or go for melodrama, but at its centre is a smouldering scene in which Vincent persuades Mrs Loyer, a victim of depression since the death of her husband 15 years previously, that life still has some ecstasy to offer her. Here the writing cuts to the quick, and it's only a pity that the play's second half doesn't run a bit further with the situation.
Wright's ear for dialogue is easy and fluent, although the idiom suggests to me an Edwardian rather than Victorian ambience. The more crucial shortcoming, however, is the failure to evoke Van Gogh's nascent artistry. In Jochum Ten Haaf's finely modulated performance, Vincent emerges as sympathetic and even charming, but, despite talk of pipes, potatoes, empty chairs, starry nights, muddy boots and other elements which he later transfigured on canvas, we never feel the frisson of genius.
What we see is nothing more than a well-meaning and gauche young man, fallen out of his depth. Perhaps that is part of Wright's point. At this early stage of his tragic career, Vincent wasn't seized by his destiny. Love, not paint, impels him forward.
Richard Eyre's staging is expertly understated and neatly resourceful, and Tim Hatley's minimal set cunningly depicts the grind of a Victorian kitchen. The play also benefits from some excellent acting. The underrated Clare Higgins is heart-rending as the long-suffering, self-denying Mrs Loyer; Emma Handy provides welcome comic relief in Act 2 as Vincent's strait-laced sister; and there is strong support from Alice Patten as Mrs Loyer's daughter and Paul Nicholls as the decorator.
The production was a huge success at the National Theatre. Transferred to a larger auditorium, it remains highly enjoyable, even if not notably profound. One only hopes that its delicate sensibility will appeal to the West End's currently rather brutal and sensationalist tastes.
What is really disturbing about Eyre's production of Wright's play at the Cottelsoe is that a sizeable section of the audience stood and cheered 'bravos' at the end. What is also surprising is that this impersonation of playwriting has received universally good reviews.
To me this suggests that dumbing down is really working and after decades of concerted effort has infected all sections of our culture. Perhaps t'was ever thus, but I doubt it. Culture - or the arts as they used to be called - has developed its own propaganda in which it seems socially dangerous not to go with the flow. To suggest that the best productions at the National are always by foreign companies, that the best dramas on television are American, that English arts culture is often a triumph of self-mythology over content is regarded as the treachery of an unpatriotic malcontent. There is a kind of shallow, cultural fascism abroad and the cheering at the curtain call of Wright's play had a distant echo of an artistic Nuremberg. Not that there is anything remotely dangerous, political or fascistic about Wright's play. In fact there is not anything remotely about it at all. One definition of 'camp' is 'failed seriousness'. That is precisely what Wright's play is: camp. And so is the audience. High camp.
Nicholas Wright was literary manager at the National under Peter Hall and Richard Eyre. 'Vincent in Brixton' is jobs for the boys, a form of administrative nepotism. I have not seen any of Nicholas Wright's other plays but on the evidence of this piece, he does not strike me as a natural writer. Literary management seems his place. Playwrights - proper ones - are a different species. Mr Wright creates the illusion of a play. In the programme are letters from Vincent. On stage Vincent speaks like his letters. Strangers meet for the first time and within minutes are talking as if they have known each other for years. Nothing makes psychological sense. And it has to be said that Jochum Ten Haaf does not make a very interesting young man, tormented genius in the making or not.
There seems to be no inner life in any of the characters although the inner life is spoken of endlessly, sometimes in monologues which borrow heavily in style from a hotchpotch of other plays and exhausted theatrical techniques, drawn for pertinence from Vincent's own paintings and desperate future - despair under star scattered skies - blackness and black birds in sketches etc and endlessly etc.. Ursula is the 'mirror' of Vincent. Well, stone me! In her despair, lo and behold, he sees himself, and some of his paintings - despair under star scattered etcs - and recognises the sweet narcotic of despair. We are in an intellectual and creative bus station.
Vincent is presented in the final act as a lost soul desperately holding on to a belief in Jesus as the balm for all things and we all know that fanatical Christians are nuts who will one day lose it totally and do something daft like cut off an ear. Unfortunately I felt dinned by the cracked ring of dramatic inauthenticity at these sonorous portents of a dark creative future being drawn from the pain in Brixton. With the exception of a few moments care of Clare Higgins ability to rise above her material, I spent the entire evening unable to experience a moment of dramatic truth.
The letters selected in the programme reveal the young Vincent as an intelligent and observant man, enjoying himself and whose strongest connection to life is already visual. His eye cannot leave the grasses and flowers, the trees and the light that will grace his future canvases. He is a painter waiting to happen. In the programme there is also a very arresting photo of the young Van Gogh. The face tells us something about the nineteen year old's inner landscape, already he seems to be searching for something. It is a young face expressing an inner dynamic. Balls, I can hear you say, he's only pissed off because of the neck clamp and the length of the exposure. Study a face, you can see something within - it's what painters do, they say, see what is thought to be unseen. Art is about looking. But there is no inner dynamic in Ten Haaf's performance. One isn't naëve enough to expect some burning, intense, embryonic madman who hates his ears to burst onstage, but what we get is something unremarkable. They went all the way to get a real Dutch actor. Why go out for hamburger when there's plenty of steak at home hanging round the local dole office?
Richard Eyre is not noted as a director able to light the blue touch paper under actors. What you tend to get in his productions is solidity. A bit like the England football team - workmanlike, loads of hard running, industry, well rehearsed but not Brazil. Eyre almost seems afraid of great acting. But then, where are the great actors? Didn't we at one time have lots of them? Why have they died out? A virus? Has this something to do with the control of the directocracy? For the modern director, great acting is a loss of control and all mafiosi insist on control. Dishing out knighthoods does not make actors great.
I cannot describe Ten Haaf's Vincent because it doesn't seem to be anything, except genuinely Dutch, whereas Emma Handy as his sister is asked to adopt a Dutch accent and give us the funny foreigner with funny accent that Orwell cited as a clear example of English prejudice. She tackles this odious task well, but this is simply one of many low, tasteless points in Wright's writing and Eyre's direction. Again, she arrives in Brixton from Holland and within minutes is behaving with a familiarity and openness one would only expect from someone who has been resident with the family for years. They cut to the chase in this production without ever getting on the horses.
The two other women burn up a bit of passion onstage, Ursula permanently grieving the loss of her husband like a middle aged Victorian female Hamlet, cherishing her neurotic grief, and Emily Blunt as her gorgeous bad tempered daughter is mildly irritated with everything. Vincent loves her, is rejected, so turns his love need on the widowed mother and strains to convince us, himself and poor sexually and emotionally starved Ursula, that he loves her. These are the unlikely dramatic developments we are invited to accept as the piece, marooned by a trundling naturalism, inches between longeurs of romanticised melancholy of a kind only found in theatres and delivered by actresses dressed in black.
Chekov sees Masha in 'The Seagull' who dresses in black because she is 'in mourning for my life' as a ridiculous figure. Mr Wright cannot quite match that unsentimental view.
Heathcote Williams sees the absurdity in Vincent in his triptych of the great artist starting to cut off his ear, in the process of cutting it off and finally having cut it off. Would that Mr. Williams had been let loose on this piece.
At the end, now returned to England as a penurious preacher and teacher, on the rickety bridge from respectable art dealing in his father's firm to the career as an artist which brought him such personal torture and us such gifts, Vincent returns for one last theatrical peroration with the woman whom he claims to have loved and has deserted. Entropy has set in all round. Everyone is very down. I was on the floor. The evening crawls towards its conclusion, or death, with Van Gogh sketching his boots as, stuffed with newspaper, they dry on Ursula's table. This of course is the model for his painting A Pair of Boots which hangs in the Baltimore Museum of Art. What a shame Ursula didn't have a nice vase of sunflowers handy.
If Don MaClean had entered singing 'Vincent' it would have been appropriate. Instead we got the bourgeois hordes going mad with delight. God help us. I met an artist I know on the way out and asked him what he thought of the play. 'Crap.' was his measured assessment, 'Van Gogh is his paintings. Without them he's nothing.' A brave thesis, and one that Messrs Eyre and Wright certainly proved.
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