by Nicholas Wright
"It’s black and it’s bright, just like you said. It’s like stars in the sky."
Aged 20, Vincent, employed in the family business of art dealers, is transferred from his native Holland to the London branch. Taking lodgings with a widowed school teacher and her daughter; he discovers a house filled with secrets, falling first for the daughter and then the mother as he is drawn into the household’s web of duplicity.
Author Nicholas Wright presents Van Gogh as he genuinely might have been, on one level raw, ruthless, naive, tactless and comically direct and at another level he displays the instinctive arrogance of talent.
The play traces the transforming effects of love, sex and youthful adventure on the young artist’s burgeoning artistic genius. Winner of the 2003 Olivier Award for Best New Play.
An amateur production by arrangement with Nick Hern Books
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CAST
Vincent
Jake Turner
Ursula
Clare Choubey
Sam
Ben Dixon
Eugenie
Laura Sherratt
Anna
Alex Milligan
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"Vincent in Brixton" by Nicholas Wright
Nottingham Lace Market Theatre
In 1873, at the age of 20, Vincent Van Gogh - pronounced in the same way as "Fun Loch" - rented a room in Brixton while he was being groomed for a career as an art dealer in his family's business. Vincent, in falling first for the landlady's daughter and then the landlady herself, is drawn into the household's web of secrets, all while carrying out household chores like peeling potatoes and doing the gardening.
Vincent is extremely naive for a twenty-year-old, by today's standards, in every sense; worldly wise and emotionally.
The play traces the transforming effects of love, sex and youthful adventure on Van Gogh's still unformed talent, portraying him as he might have been over four years. It's a mostly fictional piece of work but also includes some factual information. This is due to a lack of information from the early years of Van Gogh's life. What's a bit of poetic licence though where a good story is concerned?
Jake Turner (Vincent) dons a credible Dutch accent, which did not waver throughout. One thing you notice about the physical appearance of Jake and pictures of Van Gogh is the resemblance, it's uncanny, and the clothes have been really well researched as they match many of the clothes worn by the artist via pictorial evidence. The whole wide doe eyed look works very well to depict the naivety of the character and by the end of the four-year period, you also start to see the makings of the more mature Vincent, also brought out by his drawings.
Clare Choubey (Ursula) really wears her emotions on her sleeve as Vincent's landlady; well in fact not just on her sleeve as her style of clothes and the shade of her clothes gives indication to her mood and feelings. It's been a while since I've seen Clare on stage but she has lost none of that emotion she manages to inject into the characters she plays.
Ben Dixon (Sam) plays Ursula's other lodger. A painter and decorator who also produces decent drawings, which is where Vincent first comes across Sam. Sam is very down to earth and speaks his mind, which Vincent finds a bit hard to take and comprehend at their first meeting. The atmosphere soon mellows though and Vincent even helps Sam with his artistry. Sam is also very much in love with Ursula's daughter, causing a short-lived love triangle between Sam, Eugenie and Vincent, although one party lusts at a distance for a short while.
Laura Sherratt (Eugenie) really comes alive with the introduction of Vincent's younger sister, Anna, and sparks start to fly from all angles. There's a really nice slow burn with Eugenie and Laura bubbles along nicely until she forces Anna's hand and the pressure cooker boils over.
Alex Milligan (Anna) is the antagonist without even realising what she is doing or that she is throwing the cat among the pigeons. Her desire to look after her elder brother causes trouble and that is when Anna, in her blunt Dutch outspoken way, explains what she thinks is going on with Vincent and Eugenie and tells Ursula that Vincent is leaving for Paris on the orders of the family. What she says though causes all sorts of upset within the household. I also love Anna's accent which is even stronger than Vincent's softer Dutch tone.
Directed by Guy Evans he keeps the pace up all the way through, and while the play is not a long one, with the pace, it seems to be done sooner than we'd expected. Obviously the sign of a good storyline, direction and good acting ability to keep us all centred on the action and story unfolding before us.
There is good attention to detail, especially with the scene where Vincent returns from his Paris journey, and turns up at Ursula's door in the rain, and enters with wet hair and spots of rain on his raincoat, but there were a couple of other times I thought might have shown more realism.
When Sam and Vincent were having a beer session, bottles of beer were brought in with no liquid in. Water could have been put in the bottles for realism. One scene had Ursula take an imaginary top off of the bottle and when Ursula invited Vincent to admire the border that Sam had painted in the room, we had to imagine the border. Apart from these small things, which probably no one else noticed, I loved the rustic furniture and cooking vessels as well as the actual preparation of the food in the first scene.
Lighting Design by Allan Green. Nothing fancy here, it wasn't needed, but just told us when there was a scene change or closing and opening of the acts. Simple and effective.
Sound Design by Jack Harris. Again, the same as the lighting, simple, but a gorgeous choice of music for the scene changes and Act division.
Max Bromley is in charge of the costumes for "Vincent In Brixton". and again, we come back to that keen eye of what Vincent Van Gogh wore from the pictorial history books. the other costumes also looked to be appropriate for the time period and fitted in like the proverbial jigsaw, maybe the one that Sam was working on!
I feel educated, as well as entertained with this play, and will admit that I could have sat there even longer to see more if there had been an extended version, such was the extent of my enjoyment of this story and the classy acting form this perfectly cast cast.
Read the original article here.
Review: Vincent in Brixton. Lace Market Theatre. Nottingham
Vincent Willem Van Gogh was a Dutch Post Impressionist painter who lived throughout Europe from 1853 to 1890. In a single decade he is alleged to have created over 2,100 artworks including 860 oil paintings. Although there are collections of his work, both public and private, a good proportion of it was looted during the Second World War by the Nazis. Some of it was returned and some remains hidden from our contemporary eyes.
In Nicholas Wright’s award winning 2002 play, Vincent In Brixton, we meet Vincent Van Gogh as a very gauche 20 year-old trying to obtain lodgings in London having come over to work as an art dealer from Holland. The play is set in the early 1870s and Van Gogh is holding down one of the very few permanent full-time jobs in his life for the Dutch firm Goupil & Cie. At this juncture in his life he is not an artist by profession but indicates he has enjoyed drawing and sketching as a child.
We meet him in a buoyant, slightly nervous yet unpredictable mood as Van Gogh (Jake Turner) attempts to secure a room and board from a widow called Ursula Loyer. It is soon apparent that Vincent Van Gogh is prone to flights of romantic fantasy and sudden degrees of impolite bluntness in his critical nature, despite his surface likability. Once ensconced in the Loyer household in the quiet backstreets of Brixton (can you imagine?) Van Gogh enjoys a relatively happy time and becomes friends with a local handyman called Sam (Benjamin Dixon). All continues to go well with Van Gogh having a brief romantic fling with Mrs Loyer’s daughter Eugenie (Laura Sherratt). When he is rejected by Eugenie he turns his naive lusts onto Mrs Loyer herself. Partially rejected again for his clumsy and inappropriate behaviour, Van Gogh becomes depressed and eventually loses his position with the art firm. He turns to the Protestant religion for emotional and spiritual succour but his faith becomes another blind obsession often alienating those who surround him. This complex and disturbed young man turns to drink and Wright’s episodic play sees his fluctuating relationships faltering and a roof over his head threatened. In the second act Van Gogh’s massively disruptive busybody sister Anna (Alex Milligan) comes to stay at the Loyer household and causes havoc. Mr Vincent, thus called because English people struggled to pronounce his surname correctly, begins his steady decline whilst also discovering a fresh passion for drawing.
The Lace Market Theatre upstairs studio space is used to give an impression of Mrs Ursula Loyer’s kitchen and dining area with a rough white scrubbed wooden dining table taking centre stage. Some effort has been made to show the audience appropriate kitchenware props of the period although the three metal tables against the plain back wall spoil the illusion a little. Nonetheless, director Guy Evans brings the piece compellingly to life with good use of the limited space and well-placed lighting captures the various visual timbres and human moods.
The five actors give Vincent In Brixton some excellent, very believable, performances bordering on professional in their subtlety and slow building of their character’s journeys. Turner is compelling and likable as Van Gogh even down to his authentic ginger beard. His more grown up and down-at-heel version of Van Gogh in the second act is strikingly good.; Choubey’s Ursula broods magnificently in her widowed state and crackles in her emotional outbursts; Dixon offers up a highly plausible and slightly dangerous manual workman/would-be artist, Sam; Milligan gives Anna a brightness of energy and humour that contrasts nicely with the other more measured performances and Sherratt beguiles with her down-to- earth daughter, Eugenie. Nicholas Wright’s dramatic text gives us some cleverly inserted hints at things that will go on to influence Vincent Van Gogh’s tortured artistic genius life; the potato eaters; a starry night and the haunting history of the infant death of Vincent Van Gogh’s little brother christened with the same name, amongst others.
Vincent In Brixton ends with a positioning of the characters like a still-life on stage – something frozen in time, like a painting of a time long ago. Van Gogh’s boots are on the table – now out of the soil and locked into eternity – the ordinary and plain made somehow extra-ordinary through art. Van Gogh’s real life continued after he was forced by circumstances to leave England and he chose to live an abject and pious life amongst the desperately poor peasants in Brabant in Southern Belgium. This extreme life experience is where he starts, in earnest, to create his true art works, firstly in stark black and white images leading some years later, in the South of France, to splendidly colourful depictions of domestic interiors and portraits of ordinary people. Then he finishes with blazes of sunflowers and the forever haunting images of dark birds over sunburnt cornfields and the sound of a gun ending his life in suicide at the tender age of 37.
Vincent In Brixton is the first of the Lace Market Theatre’s productions starting this Autumn and Winter season. The run is mostly sold out but if you do get the chance try and see it. You won’t regret witnessing a version of Van Gogh’s early life on stage by this fine amateur company.
Read the original article here.
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