Vincent in Brixton E-Book

Nicholas Wright

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 89

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A moving portrait of the young Vincent van Gogh - a hit in the West End and on Broadway. Winner of the 2003 Olivier Award for Best New Play. Brixton, 1873. A brash young Dutchman rents a room in the house of an English widow. Three years later he returns to Europe on the first step of a journey which will end in breakdown, death and immortality. Nicholas Wright's play Vincent in Brixton was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in the Cottesloe auditorium, in April 2002, directed by Richard Eyre. The production transferred to Wyndhams Theatre in the West End in August 2002.

Leseprobe

Nicholas Wright

VINCENT INBRIXTON

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction: The Secrets at the Loyers

Dedication

Original Production

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

‘The Secrets at the Loyers . . . ’

Artistic genius usually announces itself at an early age. Van Gogh’s was different. Nobody in the small country parish, where his father was the pastor, spotted a painter in the making, least of all himself. And when, at the age of sixteen, he took up a junior post in The Hague with the international art-dealing firm Goupil and Co., it wasn’t a stepping-stone towards life as an artist. No fewer than three of his uncles were art dealers and young Vincent was simply being groomed for a middle-class career in the family tradition.

At the age of twenty he was transferred to Goupil’s London gallery at the comfortable salary of £90 a year. Two years later, at what seems to have been the instigation of his father, he was transferred to the Paris branch. He came back to England after a year to work as an unpaid schoolteacher, first in Ramsgate and then in Isleworth, and, on December 20th 1876, he went home to Holland for Christmas, never to return.

Years of preaching and drifting followed. It wasn’t until the summer of 1880 that, in a long, passionate letter to his younger brother Theo, he declared his intention to become an artist. ‘The aim becomes more definite, will stand out slowly and surely, as the rough draft becomes a sketch, and the sketch becomes a picture – little by little, by working seriously on it, by pondering over the idea, vague at first, over the thought that was fleeting and passing, till it gets fixed.’ From now on, his letters are filled with descriptions of his drawing and painting, along with urgent demands for money and materials. His new life was to last for exactly ten years: in 1890, at the age of thirty-seven, he shot himself.

Theo died six months later, leaving a baby son and a young widow. In his role as an art-dealer for Goupil, he had sold not a single one of Vincent’s paintings. (Vincent’s only sale came about independently.) In her diary, Theo’s widow now described the responsibility she felt towards her fantastic inheritance: ‘ . . . to show it, and to let it be appreciated as much as possible . . . All the treasures that Theo and Vincent collected – to preserve them inviolate for the child.’ For the rest of her long life she curated and guarded Vincent’s paintings, skilfully steering them on to the international market.

Most of what we know about Vincent’s life in England comes from her edition of his letters to Theo, and from her short memoir of him. Other clues survive in odd places: his name appears in the visitors’ book of the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, where he went to look at the Rembrandts, and there’s a reference to a ‘Mr. Vincent van Gof’ in the minutes of Turnham Green Congregational Church. There are also the letters exchanged between Vincent’s parents and siblings. These are vivid with the drama of a God-fearing family whose unstable son is at loose in a city of doubtful morality. When Vincent and his sister Anna abruptly left the Loyer household, their mother knew exactly who to blame. ‘Since the summer he has been abnormal,’ she wrote. ‘The secrets at the Loyers did him no good’.

The Loyers’ address – 87, Hackford Rd., SW9 – was unknown until 1971, when a London postman named Paul Chalcroft, who was also a keen amateur painter, took advantage of the long postal strike of that year to mount a search with the help of local records, census returns and (I like to think) his first-hand knowledge of the layout of local streets. Thanks to him the house now has a blue plaque and the identities of the school-teacher-landlady, her young daughter and her other lodger are a matter of fact.

Vincent in Brixton is based on all these bits and pieces of evidence, but it goes much further than any biographer could do in interpreting them. (The most authoritative factual accounts can be found in Martin Bailey’s book Young Vincent and his 1992 Exhibition Catalogue Van Gogh in England.) In speculating about what might have happened between the five inhabitants of this roomy, suburban house in the 1870s, I was encouraged by the partiality of family myth, by an intriguing six-month gap in Vincent’s surviving letters and by the well-known tendency of young men writing home to be less than frank about their most formative experiences.

A significant part of the writing of the play was done as the result of a week-long workshop at the Royal National Theatre Studio. Thanks to Sue Higginson, who runs the Studio, to Richard Eyre, who directed the workshop, and to Tim Hatley, Emma Handy, Clare Higgins, Lee Ingleby, Lyndsey Marshal, Paul Ready, Maddy Grant and Eddie Keogh: the imaginations and energies of these old and new friends were crucial.

NW

FOR DAVID

as always

Vincent in Brixton was first presented in the Cottesloe at the National Theatre on 24 April 2002. The cast was as follows:

URSULA LOYER

Clare Higgins

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Jochum ten Haaf

EUGENIE LOYER

Emily Blunt

SAM PLOWMAN

Paul Nicholls

ANNA VAN GOGH

Emma Handy

Director

Richard Eyre

Designer

Tim Hatley

Lighting Designer

Peter Mumford

Music

Dominic Muldowney

Sound Designer

Neil Alexander

This production transferred to Wyndhams Theatre, London, on 5 August 2002 (with Eugenie now played by Alice Patten), and was televised on 20 March 2003 on BBC 4.

The production was presented by Lincoln Center Theater at the John Golden Theater, New York, on 13 February 2003 with the following cast changes:

EUGENIE LOYER

Sarah Drew

SAM PLOWMAN

Pete Starrett

ANNA VAN GOGH

Liesel Matthews

Vincent in Brixton returned to the Playhouse Theatre, London, on 10 July 2003, followed by a tour of the UK.

Characters

URSULA LOYER, late forties

VINCENT VAN GOGH, twenty

EUGENIE LOYER, eighteen

SAM PLOWMAN, twenty-one

ANNA VAN GOGH, eighteen

Time: 1873-1876

Place: The kitchen at 87 Hackford Road, London

ACT ONE

Winter. Sunday morning. A big wooden table, functional and unusual. A stove-cum-boiler. Pots of water boiling.

URSULA shows VINCENT in. She’s been showing him a room upstairs. She’s dressed in black. VINCENT is twenty. He’s smartly dressed in his Sunday suit, with a top hat and polished boots. Red hair.

URSULA. Where are you staying at present?

VINCENT. In Greenwich. But the church . . .

URSULA gets on with her cooking, picking up from where she left off before answering the door. At present she’s peeling and trimming sprouts.

. . . the church I attend is here in Brixton. Brixton Congregational Church. I like the service. It’s sincere and plain. It is the kind of service I would attend at home. So it is worth the walk.

URSULA. The walk?

VINCENT. Oh, yes.

URSULA. Did you walk from Greenwich?

VINCENT. Yes.

URSULA. How long did it take you?

VINCENT. Two hours.

URSULA. Do you do a lot of walking, Mr. Vincent?

VINCENT. Yes.

URSULA. Do you walk to work?

VINCENT. Oh no!

He laughs.

It may be once or twice, at the end of the month, the state of my pocket means that I walk to work, but no, as a general rule I take the ha’penny steamboat to Waterloo Bridge and then I walk to Covent Garden. But on Sundays or on holidays, when I’ve no-one to talk to, then I walk as far as my legs will take me.

URSULA puts salt and soda in a pot of boiling water and tips the sprouts in. Having done that, she starts chopping parsley. Meanwhile:

URSULA. Don’t you have any friends in London?

VINCENT. No. I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m too forward in my feelings. Or I speak my mind too bluntly. But I cannot change my nature. You must know that, Mrs. Loyer. If it upsets you to have a plain, outspoken Dutchman in your house, then you must say so. I will bear you no ill-will. I will walk back to Greenwich with a good heart and proud of what God has made me. But I hope you will accept me as your lodger. I like the room which you have shown me. I like this part of London, it has a, how can I say, a Monday-morninglike sobriety about it which reminds me of Holland. What more can I add? I’m quiet. I’m an assiduous reader. I am a temperance man. I’d be a steady tenant for twelve months at least. Next year I hope to be transferred to Paris.

URSULA starts assembling a pan-sized fish-cake: fish, mashed potatoes, parsley, white of egg, salt, pepper. In time she will brush it with egg and cover it in breadcrumbs. Meanwhile:

URSULA. To Paris?

VINCENT. Yes.

URSULA. Do you speak French?

VINCENT. My French is . . . well, it’s about as good as my English.

URSULA. Vous parlez très bien Anglais. Avec un vocabulaire très bon. J’ai trouvé cet ‘assiduous’ tres impressionant.

VINCENT. Quant à vous, Madame, la façon dont vous parlez le Francais laisserai supposer que vous êtes au moins Francaise!

URSULA. My husband was French. He was a teacher at the Grammar across the road.

VINCENT. I see.

There’s a pause while URSULA attends to the cooking.

May I take the room?

URSULA. You haven’t asked the rent.

VINCENT. No, I forgot.

URSULA. One moment.

She finishes what she was doing.

I charge twelve and sixpence a week, or eighteen shillings with breakfast and Sunday midday dinner. Is that agreeable?

VINCENT. Yes.

URSULA. Which do you want?

VINCENT. The breakfast, please, and the Sunday dinner.

URSULA. And how much notice must you give in your present arrangement?

VINCENT. One week.

URSULA. Then I shall see you on Sunday next.

VINCENT. Thank you. Thank you.

URSULA. You’ll have a key, so you can come and go as it suits you. The dining-room’s off the hall. Breakfast is served at seven.

VINCENT. Seven o’clock. I’ll remember that.

URSULA. Your bath-night will be Wednesday. Fresh bedlinen is provided once a week. If you want any personal laundry done, Bridget will look after it for an additional one and sixpence. That’s shirts twice a week, collars daily and all the rest of it.

VINCENT. Who is Bridget?

URSULA. Bridget’s the maid. She isn’t here today, she doesn’t do Sundays. Your travelling-trunk, or anything large, we can put in the box-room. Do you play the piano?

VINCENT. No, I’m quiet in every way.

URSULA. I was only going to say that there’s a piano in the schoolroom. Did I tell you about the school?

VINCENT. No?