by Nicholas Wright
seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 19 March 2026
Georgia Green directs Jeroen Frank Kales as Vincent van Gogh, Amber van der Brugge as his younger sister Anna, Niamh Cusack as Ursula Loyer, who becomes his landlady in Brixton (Stockwell actually), Ayesha Ostler as her daughter Eugenie and Rawaed Asde as Sam Plowman, the other lodger in the house.
The twenty-year-old Vincent came to London as an employee of his uncle's art dealership (headquarters in The Hague); naturally he was short of money and looking for affordable lodgings within relatively easy reach of his office. The play opens as he is just finishing an interview with Ursula Loyer, who agrees that he might move in, and even offers him Sunday lunch immediately.
The boy is callow and opinionated, and fairly brusque in the manner of a foreigner grappling with English. He is also emotionally needy and immediately fixates on Ursula's daughter Eugenie, only to be rebuffed by her - she and the other lodger, the easy-going Sam, are already an "item". Ursula initially wants to withdraw her offer of the lodging, but agrees that he may stay if he forgoes any thought of paying court to Eugenie.
It's a situation bristling with tension, made worse by the veneer of respectability required to preserve Ursula's position as the head of a small boys' school (the students meet in the front room of the house). When Vincent transfers his affections from daughter to mother the situation inevitably becomes more fraught; and when his censorious sister Anna comes to live in the house matters only become even more difficult, and Vincent acquiesces in a family plan to move him to Paris. And yet, some time later, when he, full of unwelcome evangelical fervour, makes a brief call to the house, there is the first glimmer of his future career as he begins to sketch his work boots lying on a newspaper on the table - a knowing reference to one of his celebrated paintings.
In the small space of the Orange Tree the kitchen is suitably cramped, especially as there is a functioning cooker in use to one side, and a table for preparing vegetables in the middle, as Ursula prepares the Sunday lunch. But the space is ideally suited for the intimacy of the piece, and the cast perform it very well. Vincent's earnestness it utterly compelling and the pitfalls awaiting his naiveté all the more wrenching to appreciate. The weird subversion of "respectable" Victorian values espoused by the household are a trap for the unwary, yet they seem completely plausible. In the capable hands of Niamh Cusack Ursula Loyer, the still-grieving widow of fifteen years who flourishes in Vincent's attentions, but is crushed again when he leaves, provides a strong counterpoint to her more famous lodger. Knowing the mental instability that would bedevil Vincent's later career, it is fascinating to see the warning signs in this intriguing play.
