VINCENT IN BRIXTON

 This drama by Nicholas Wright,  performed by Cwmni Richard Burton at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama takes place in the kitchen of 87 Hackford Road,Brixton between 1873 and 1876. Vincent Van Gogh was 27 and had come to London to work as an art dealer for the international firm Goupil & Co. This part of his life is relatively unknown. There's speculation that he had feelings for his landlady, her daughter and for a family friend in Holland. The play focuses on his romantic and stormy  relationship with Ursula, his older landlady, her daughter and another lodger, a painter and decorator who is also an artist.
      I don't know if it was the direction or if there is archival evidence that the artist was a naeve simpleton, but in the first half this is the way he is portrayed. He is jealous of  the other lodger and sets out to try his own hand at drawing. Ursula encourages the lodger,Sam to apply for a scholarship to art school. He gets a place but he also gets Eugenie pregnant and because of his low income cannot take up his place.
         Vincent goes to Holland for a break and on his return tells Ursula how angry and frustrated he felt about his family's attitude to life. His father is a preacher. He shows her a pencil drawing of his father's church. She becomes apoplectic and throws a good porcelain plate at him for not expressing those feelings in his painting. She tells him about her black moods and he tells her that he sees himself in their reflection. Vincent's sister Anna arrives, sent by their parents to keep an eye on him. He's to be posted to Paris with the firm but after an argument he leaves without telling Ursula, not to return for two years. By this time he's been sacked and showing signs of being a bit of a religous zealot, he's passionate about God, life, nature, his painting. He thanks Ursula for giving him the gift of sorrow.
        The play is peppered with references to Vincent's paintings-we see vases of Irises, talk of starry nights in Paris, cherry blossom painted on the skirting board of the kitchen. The actors gave strong emotional performances, more so in the second half, and Vincent seems more the character we've read and know about. He starts painting at 27 and by 37  takes his own life, leaving a legacy of work expressing his passionate emotions. How revolutionary that must have been at the time.