>>PREVIEW
VINCENT IN BRIXTON
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until May 20
(Martha Cohen Theatre)
The most familiar picture of Vincent van Gogh is a self-portrait painted four years before his suicide. Bearded and staring out from the canvas, he appears tired and slightly haggard.
Knowing that this was a man renowned for severing a part of his ear as a romantic gesture, who would also end his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, it isn’t hard not to see something of the tortured artist beneath his expression.
In 2002, playwright Nicholas Wright painted his own picture of one of the most infamous artists in history, focusing on a year-long period during which the young artist, then an art dealer, lived in Brixton, England. The period represents a gap in van Gogh’s correspondence with his brother Theo, and provides the conceit for Wright’s play, Vincent in Brixton, currently being produced by Alberta Theatre Projects. But where the figure in van Gogh’s self-portrait is recognizable as the suffering genius, Wright’s van Gogh is a figure more familiar as a young man on his journey toward adulthood.
"The play deals in a way with the moment before a recognizable public figure becomes a public commodity," says director Glenda Stirling. "This is the journey for any young man, but we see him in the act of becoming Vincent van Gogh.
"We skip the ear slicing," she adds.
In fact, though van Gogh is best known as the veritable poster child for the disaffected artist, Wright’s rendering sees a more human face put on the familiar tortured soul. Long before his suicide, or the fame that preceded his death, van Gogh is drawn as an ingénue art dealer in an unfamiliar city, surrounded by a sort of improvised second family whose members are also struggling to find themselves.
Under Ursula Loyer’s (Laura Parken) roof, Vincent forms friendships with Ursula and fellow boarder Sam Plowman (Tyrell Crews), a housepainter with art school aspirations, who also has a burgeoning relationship with Ursula’s daughter, Eugenie (Jamie Konchak). Prone to inappropriate outbursts and fickle infatuation, first for Eugenie and later for Ursula herself, Wright’s van Gogh is every inch a young man coming to terms with himself and his true desires.
"I think people are probably coming to see a certain Vincent van Gogh, but you don’t see any of that until the end of the play," says Rylan Wilkie, who plays Vincent. "As an outsider, that was what really drew me in.
"(Wright) didn’t try to write about the tortured artist, which would actually be quite boring," he says, noting the exhaustion of the archetype.
Both Stirling and Wilkie empathize with the situation van Gogh finds himself in – living in a foreign country while still in his formative years. Wilke once stayed in Dublin for three months while Stirling lived for a time in Brixton while she continued her theatrical training. Background, like the research that often goes into a play before it’s staged, influences the production without overwhelming it.
"I research like crazy," says Stirling. "Music of the era, books of the era, all that kind of stuff, all that on the evidential fact, and luckily I lived in Brixton when I was about Vincent’s age.
"And then I throw it all away, because I’m not doing research, I’m doing the play."
"In the end, none of that really matters," agrees Wilkie. "To be informative, we can only play with what Nicholas Wright has given us."
What Wright has given paints a very particular portrait of the young art dealer-cum-artist, whose passion belies his religiously conservative origins, manifested in the third act in his judgmental sister, Anna (Gemma Smith) and her tactless intrusions. Though van Gogh himself left the world with a lasting picture of the artist – both in his figurative imprint as an artist and the literal, haunting stare of his self-portrait – Wright has opted to imagine a young man who is far more human than the abstracted notion of a famous artist. That, according to Stirling, is the value of this imagined portrait.
"You can get all that stuff, there are reams of books and correspondence," she says. "What you can’t get is an imagined glimpse at a period in his life that we don’t know much about.
"We don’t see a crazy artist. We see someone with an enormous capacity for joy or sorrow." |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.