The young Vincent van Gogh spent a year in south London pursuing a fitful career as an art dealer, and may have had a relationship with his landlady or her daughter. Nicholas Wright’s 2002 play imagines this episode: in Georgia Green’s tender production, it emerges as far more than a footnote from art history.
Landlady Ursula, clinging to crow-black widow’s weeds, feels her life is over. Vincent, all misdirected energy, tries to get his life started. In Wright’s telling, they share a mental perturbation: they uncover kinship in misery, then a romance that alleviates it.
The snug Orange Tree stage suits Charlotte Henery’s kitchen setting, made for quiet confidences. Sunday roast turns the air savoury. Donato Wharton’s gentle sound design adds birdsong, pans puttering on the stove, the rush of Vincent’s blood at his first kiss.
Jeroen Frank Kales makes a pale and knobbly Vincent. His maladroit candour is almost too much for the space, always at risk of scattering the crockery. At first sight, Niamh Cusack’s Ursula is all steady competence: hands moving swiftly over eggs and herbs. But before long, she is drawn and twitchy, Cusack’s rich-layered voice a distraught murmuration.
In a time before a diagnostic vocabulary for mental illness, Wright’s characters must find other ways to describe their feelings: personal and poetic. They fall into the darkness of their soul; wretchedness casts a thick fog in every corner. The play is brimful with troubling emotion.
The writing is wonderfully non-judgmental, and Green’s cast give full-hearted performances. An excellent Rawaed Asde plays the other lodger, a ferment of doubt beneath his bonhomie. Ayesha Ostler is Ursula’s vigilant daughter, and Amber van der Brugge is briskly abrasive as Vincent’s fervent young sister.
The relationship is a brief, radiant interlude. Ursula sinks into lassitude, and Vincent becomes a man of sorrows. This is Van Gogh before he finds his vocation – there are only intimations of the works that lie ahead, as he sketches his muddy boots, lying askew on the kitchen table. But Wright’s play is no rehashed biography – it’s a feeling exploration of restless souls.
• At Orange Tree theatre, London, until 18 April
