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London Review
London ReviewGirl With a Pearl Earring
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All that will survive is beauty— Vermeer
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Kimberley Nixon as Griet
(Photo: Clive Barda) |
With the increasing trend for producers to take successful films and to translate them for the stage, Girl With a Pearl Earring comes to the West End. It seems less than creative to me to fill theatres built for plays with pale imitations of cinema hits although I'm not opposed to the reverse process as in taking the stage hits, Mamma Mia and Chicago and making them into movies. Maybe I'm just a stage snob or maybe cinematography can add to a theatrical hit with outdoor locations and close ups more than staging can intensify film?
Tracy Chevalier's story, here adapted by David Joss Buckley (known for his Bradford pantomimes) concentrates on a fictional account of the painting which shows a young girl, doe-eyed and lips moistened, turning slighting towards the artist. The fiction is that the picture a very modest girl (she won't take off her cap). Her name is Griet (Kimberley Nixon) and she's the daughter of a painter of tiles who is employed as a maid in the Vermeer household. Griet's ability to colour match is used by the artist and her good eye for detail means that she can be trusted to dust the objects he is painting from.
The matriarch and owner of this house is Vermeer's mother-in-law Maria Thins (Sara Kestelman), who seems to be the painter's business manager in negotiations with his patron Van Ruijven (Niall Buggy). Catharina Vermeer (Lesley Vickerage) the painter's Catholic wife is continually giving birth to one of fifteen children. We briefly see the "old maid" Tanneke (Maggie Service) who is a spit for the painting of The Milkmaid. Pieter the Butcher's boy (Jonathan Bailey) is Griet's suitor. The assumption is that the look on Griet's face is wide eyed and sexual and certainly Vermeer's (Adrian Dunbar) wife and daughter Cornelia (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) are jealous of the very pretty and very modest Griet. When one of the mistress's earrings is borrowed to complete the picture and the maid's ear is painfully pierced, there is an explanation for the misty look in the maid's eyes.
Girl With a Pearl Earring is very prettily lit with an interesting revolving set to give three changes, a reception room, studio and kitchen. I liked too the floor tiled in red and black and the side stage chequerboard of light and dark. Many of the cast wear wigs and costumes seen in the paintings, typical of the attention paid to this production's visual detail. Catharina is dressed in an unfortunate tent shaped top with fur trim making it look like the top half of a Father Christmas outfit in mid blue. This shape is authentically period when we look at it in a yellow colour way as The Woman with the Pearl Necklace but translated to the twenty first century it looks bizarre.
While the performances are sound there is little depth of passion for the actors to interpret. I hope that Kimberley Nixon who is very pretty and has a lovely stage presence will find a more worthy play soon. The nearest the play gets to sexual activity is when Griet takes off her white cap and shows her hair, or maybe this is intended to have a symbolic meaning. The play is narrative driven with little opportunity for effective dramatization. I am often uncomfortable with fictional accounts added on to the history of real people and in this case, I feel incensed at Tracy Chevalier's cynical exploitation of art for the chicklit fiction market. If you want to know about Vermeer, go to an art gallery and allow your own imagination to take over when you look at the paintings, not the Chevalier overlay, and certainly not this tedious two hours in the theatre.
Oh and if you are interested, look carefully at Vermeer's picture of the woman in A Lady Writing and see if you see any resemblance to the pearl earring girl? Now tell me which two of Vermeer paintings feature the wide yellow ermine trimmed top? An interesting website with books on Vermeer written by art historians can be found at, http://www.essentialvermeer.com.
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Girl With a Pearl Earring
Adapted by David Joss Buckley from the novel by Tracy Chevalier Directed by Joe Dowling Starring: Adrian Dunbar, Niall Buggy With: Sara Kestelman, Lesley Vickerage, Kimberley Nixon, Maggie Service, Jonathan Bailey, Flora Spencer-Longhurst Set and Lighting Design: Peter Mumford Costume Design: Fotini Dimou Sound: Matt McKenzie Composer: Christopher Gunning Running time: Two hours with one interval Box Office: 0844 412 4653 Booking to 1st November 2009 Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 30th September 2008 performance at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, London SW1 (Tube: Piccadilly Circus) |
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