Vincent In Brixton
The Sunday Age
Sunday October 23, 2005
WHERE: Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda. Tel: 9533 8083 WHEN: To November 5 ***
In 1873, Vincent Van Gogh was working for the London branch of his uncle's art dealership, Goupil and Co, and fell in love with his landlady's daughter. Nicholas Wright's play takes these events and embroiders them into a birth-of-the-artist narrative, ending with Vincent taking up his crayon to sketch a pair of boots left on a chair. It's well-crafted, though the awkward encounters of Vincent (Adam Hunter) with his freethinking companions - landlady Ursula, who becomes his lover (Saskia Post, playing a depressive with empathy and restraint); her daughter Eugenie (Verity Charlton); and Eugenie's lover, Sam (Richard Cawthorne) - allow Wright to indulge a patronising humour at his expense. We see him through the eyes of his English friends, who are better-balanced and more worldly than he, and he comes to look like a bit of a crank. Jonathan Messer's direction and Hunter's performance emphasise the aspects of the text that make Van Gogh's pig-headed saintliness into a joke.
© 2005 The Sunday Age