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A CurtainUp Review
Vincent in Brixton
Has Vincent of Brixton Made a Successful Move
to Broadway?
by Elyse Sommer
Original London Review by Lizzie Loveridge
Wyndhams Theatre Review by Brian Clover
As with our recent posting on Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, the yellow background indicates that this is CurtainUp's third take on this biodrama -- or more aptly, bio-fiction, since playwright Nicholas Wright used his imagination to dramatize bits and pieces of Van Gogh factual information. With the Greenberg play, each viewing raised the level of enthusiasm for the playwright, actors and director. It's disappointing to report that this isn't entirely ture for Vincent In Brixton.
Jochum Ten Haaf and Clare Higgins are still as pleasurable to watch as they were in London's equivalent of Off-Broadway and Broadway houses, the Cottesloe and the Wyndhams. Wright's combining fact with fiction works beautifully when he has Vincent tell Ursula "I love your age; I love your unhappiness", , an elaboration a phrase from an actual letter about a woman not being old as long as she is loved.
The production is beautiful to look at, like a Van Gogh still life -- perhaps a bit too still for American audiences. The main problem though is that this is a very intimate piece of work that seems to demand a correspondingly intimate setting. As Lizzie Loveridge pointed out when she saw it at the tiny Cottesloe, her experience was enhanced by the closeness between actors and audience and that a transfer would need to incorporate this effect. According to our second review by Brian Clover this didn't quite happen with the Wyndham transfer, and it happens even less now that the award-winning play has arrived on Broadway.
The Golden is hardly a behemoth and the smells of the real food being sliced and diced and simmered (meat instead of the fish which Lizzie tells me originally accompanied the potatoes) wafts its way all the way to the last rows of the orchestra. Unfortunately, and the major shortcoming of this production, the same is not true of the words which seem to be victims of the larger theater and/or poor acoustics. I overheard numerous complaints from people no further than half-way back. The men seemed particularly difficult to hear.
Still, paintings and the expression on Clare Higgins' face when Ten Haaf, having declared his love, begins to unbutton her shirtwaist, need no words to be savored and understood. If you're wondering, about Vincent eating all those potatoes, click over to www.artchive.com/artchive/V/vangogh.html, one of many Van Gogh web pages, and take a look at the reproduction of his famous "The Potato Eaters " Click on "Still Life of Shoes" and you'll understand the wit of the bi s of business about dirty shoes brought in from the garden.
The actors joining the two leads, are fine, with Liesel Matthews, in the smallest part, adding considerable life and energy when she makes her appearance at the beginning of the second act. Not to be overlooked as a distinctive addition to this production is the scrim curtain with Wendell K. Harrington's handsome projections of the streets of Brixton.
BROADWAY PRODUCTION NOTES
Vincent in Brixton
Written by Nicholas Wright
Directed by Richard Eyre
Set and Costumes: Design by Time Hatley
Music: Dominic Muldowney
Starring: Clare Higgins, Jochum Ten Haaf
New cast members: Sarah Drew, Liesel Matthews and Pete Starrett.
Lighting: Peter Mumford
Sound: Neil Alexander
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, includes 15 minute intermission
Vincent in Brixton
Golden, 252 W. 45th ST.. 239-6200
From 2/13/03-- 6/08/03; opening 3/06/03
Tue 7pm, Wed-Sat 8pm, Wed & Sat 2pm, Sun 3pm $55-$70
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No woman is old. That does not mean that there are no old women, but that a woman is not old as long as she loves and is loved.
-- Vincent in a letter to his brother Theo from London 31 July 1874
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Vincent in Brixton is one of those plays which gets under your skin, leaving your imagination whirring long after the play is over. Of course the material is excellent - the early years of a painter who had a troubled life, whose paintings were not recognised as masterpieces in his lifetime but which now command some of the highest prices ever paid by the art world.
What makes Richard Eyre's direction of Vincent in Brixton special is not just the intimacy of the set or the assured quality of the writing but the delicate portrait of the young Vincent by the Dutch actor, Jochum Ten Haaf. He is awkward and shy, funny and endearing and bears a remarkable physical resemblance to the red haired Vincent.
The substance of Nicholas Wright's play has to be part fact, part conjecture. What was it that made Vincent van Gogh into a great painter? Does genius go hand in hand with mental instability? On record are the letters, wonderfully descriptive of nature and plants and trees, that Vincent exchanged with his younger brother Theo, and something mysteriously referred to by Vincent's parents as the "secrets at the Loyers".
At the age of sixteen, Vincent van Gogh followed his father and uncles into the art dealing business by taking a post at Goupil and Co. in The Hague, Holland. In 1873 aged twenty he was transferred to work in the London branch of the gallery where he stayed for two years.
Wright's play commences with Vincent's arrival at Mrs Ursula Loyer's house in Brixton where he has come as a boarder. Living in the middle aged widow and schoolteacher, Mrs Loyer's (Clare Higgins) house are another lodger who has artistic aspirations, Sam Plowman (Paul Nicholls) who is secretly romantically involved with Ursula's very pretty daughter, Eugenie (Emily Blunt) who laughs off Vincent's declaration of love. We see Vincent, a rather odd and awkward young man discover love and sex with the older woman who is lifted from her depression by the joy of her relationship. After a visit from his sister Anna (Emma Handy), the family intervene and he is sent to work in Paris though he returns to live in London after a year and again visits the Loyers.
The whole play takes place in a tiny trough of a set, a narrow Victorian kitchen dominated by a long narrow wooden table with furrows and grooves and plenty of accurate detail such as a range on which the cast actually cook. The audience are seated either side of this fragrant kitchen. The first act is a slow textured build. The second act sees a lot of change not just in Vincent's relationship with Ursula but also with Eugenie and Sam.
Vincent van Gogh (and he tells us how to pronounce it, van like fun and Gogh rhyming with the Scottish loch) is socially clumsy, shows some quirks which maybe early signs of the mental instability which blighted his short life. Jochum Ten Haaf is fascinating to watch. His Vincent has an earnest gauche quality, sincere but is sometimes overly frank and brash. Clare Higgins' character of the widow is prone to depression and Vincent can empathise with this. Ursula Loyer starts the second act as a different woman. Gone are the black widow's weeds and this rejuvenated woman wears colour, lipstick and is obviously happy, only to once more sink into depression after Vincent's departure. Clare Higgins' portrayal is as effective as it is sensitive. Vincent's sister Anna (Emma Handy) is almost a pantomime figure as she busies herself in obsessively cleaning the Loyer's house. Besides the study of Vincent, Nicholas Wright portrays two generations of women both of whom break Victorian convention. Eugene Loyer in the course of the play changes from carefree but self-assured young girl to drained mother of two demanding children who also cares for her depressed mother.
Richard Eyre, the last Artistic Director of the National, has chosen to direct in this confined space but of course, in the Cottesloe the audience is close enough to the actors to pick up the smallest change of facial expression. Vincent in Brixton is a play which deserves to transfer but care will need to be taken to find a venue that can be converted to give the same effect.
You may want to check up our review of Nicholas Wright's play about Seventeenth century boy actors, Cressida
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 2nd May 2002 performance at the Cottesloe, National Theatre.
-- and re-reviewed per below, when it transferred to the Wyndhams Theatre
Vincent in Brixtontransfers to the Wyndhams Theatre and Brian Clover Takes a Second Look
Vincent in Brixton transferred to Wyndhams Theatre, following a very long run by Art and a very short one by Madonna.
"Since we are in the West End, an enterprizing street-trader is selling prosthetic ears from a stall outside the theatre. 'Forget your rabbit feet!' he cries. 'Buy your lucky Van Gogh ears!"
Nicholas Wright's imaginative reconstruction of Van Gogh's early years leaves the modernist rigours of the Cottesloe to be framed by the decorative splendours of a Victorian proscenium. Ironically, a hundred years ago canny art dealers sold dangerously "modern" Van Goghs and Picassos by exhibiting them in elaborate gilt frames, thereby making them more palatable to conservative patrons.
Perhaps it is this setting that makes the piece appear less daring than it originally did. The four scenes seem schematic rather than organic. First, Vincent the foreigner arrives and his character is established; second, a rhapsody as love blooms; third, tragi-farce as love is challenged; finally, love, despair, pain and life itself are transcended by art. The final image is a very Victorian allegory of Motherhood, Manual Labour, and the Mortally-Wounded Muse sitting around the Table of Life as the Artist ignores the claims of all of them and embraces his vocation.
The late Angela Carter, novelist and fabulist, once described to me her meeting with poet Ted Hughes. Like many before her, she found him fascinating and attractive, but said alarm bells rang when he explained how the female anima must destroy itself to fuel the (presumably male) creative process. Something like this notion lies behind Vincent in Brixton, leaving us a little uncomfortable. (Angela ran a mile.)
But you may not agree and the play is still a very pleasurable night out for connoisseurs of fine acting. Clare Higgins excels as Ursula, Vincent's landlady and lover, coaxed out of despair to reveal herself both physically and emotionally, only to be crushed once more. Jochum Ten Haaf is thoroughly convincing as the unstable Vincent, inflicting casual brutalities on all sides as he gropes his way to an understanding of who he is. His Dutch accent is excellent - but no prizes for that, since he's Dutch. Prizes for Emma Handy, though, as his sister Anna, for an equally good accent and wicked comic timing.
Alice Patten, as Ursula's daughter Eugenie, and Paul Nicholls as Sam, the other lodger, have less to do, but do it very well. I would only quibble with their accents. Granted the pedigree of this production - Richard Eyre/National Theatre -- it seems odd that Eugenie should be allowed to sound like a parson's daughter reading for a place at Drama School, or that Sam should come across as the Artful Dodger's older, cockier, brother.
Tim Hatley's set - complete with hot steaming potatoes - is excellent, as is the lighting by Peter Mumford. The kitchen table, Victorian oven, and subtly shifting light are almost characters in their own right, inviting us to meditate on the constancy of objects and the inconstancy of observing them.
*Plastic ears rain down on the stage.*
A thoughtful night out.
NEW PRODUCTION NOTES
Vincent in Brixton
Written by Nicholas Wright
Directed by Richard Eyre
Design by Time Hatley
Music: Dominic Muldowney
Starring: Clare Higgins, Jochum Ten Haaf
With: Alice Patten, Paul Nicholls, Emma Handy
Lighting: Peter Mumford
Sound: Neil Alexander
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, 15 minute interval
Wydhams Theatre, Charing Cross Road, London SW1 (Tube Station: Leicester Square)
Box Office: 020 7369 1736
Booking to 26th October
Reviewed by Brian Clover based on 12th August 2002 performaNCE
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©Copyright2000, 2002, 2003, Elyse Sommer, CurtainUp.
Information from this site may not be reproduced in print or online
without specific permission from esommer@curtainup.com
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