VINCENT IN BRIXTON. To 26 October.

London

VINCENT IN BRIXTON
by Nicholas Wright

Wyndhams Theatre
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 45min One interval

TICKETS 020 7369 1736
Review Timothy Ramsden 6 August

A good play in an exemplary production.This, in many ways, a very good play - if not quite as perfect some have suggested. Among its qualities is Wright's ability to sustain scenes naturally. His realism is welcome it's the kind of quietly developing piece that can easily be lost among noisier styles.

It's Sam, the lodger and semi-acknowledged lover of her daughter, who points out to newly-arrived Vincent that nothing in Ursula Loyer's rooming-house and preparatory school is as it seems. The ways this is so are beautifully understated and gradual in their revelation. All help develop the characters seen in the thin strip of kitchen, which has translated remarkably well from the Cottesloe's traverse staging to a proscenium stage in the larger Wyndhams.

Ten Haaf's Dutchman is clumsily polite, somehow decisive in his indecision. An art dealer's man, he claims no skills himself, and sets about drawing mainly to impress young Eugenie, who's already soft on Sam's pencil-work. But he soon transfers his affection to her mother, Clare Higgins in a fine-drawn portrait of a progressive Victorian woman wrapped in a 15-year old bereavement. Only in the third scene, when her relationship with Vincent is blooming yet, unknown to them, about to drop, does she emerge from mourning into lighter-hued clothes.

After a perfect first half, Vincent's sister arrives. Despite fine playing from Emma Handy, Anna is really comic foreigner and plot contrivance combined. After she's managed Vincent's departure, a couple of years elapse before he returns to receive Ursula's, and the play's, rather obvious lesson on the need to fuse art and feeling. The play doesn't explore the apparent contradiction of Vincent having to learn this while proclaiming the need for an artist to renounce everyone and everything (just as he - no artist yet - becomes a preacher, working with, or on, people).

And the play culminates in an image of his artistic preoccupation intently drawing his boots, which could come from any halfway-decent Hollywood biopic. What no-one else could easily offer is the five fine performances and production values, or Richard Eyre's detailed, scrupulous direction, which seamlessly matches dialogue to daily actions cooking, cleaning and makes every nuance, each glance and movement speak.

Ursula Loyer: Clare Higgins
Vincent Van Gogh: Jochum Ten Haaf
Eugenie Loyer: Alice Patten
Sam Plowman: Paul Nicholls
Anna Van Gogh: Emma Handy

Director: Richard Eyre
Designer: Tim Hatley
Lighting: Peter Mumford
Sound: Neil Alexander
Music: Dominic Muldowney
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg

2002-08-09 15:41:13