Nicholas Wright's play, which fleshes out a blank period in the life of artist Vincent Van Gogh, is like a very good still life. Glance at it and you think it is one thing and perhaps not very interesting, peer more closely and you discover it is quite another.
Would-be artist Sam Plowman (Louis Cancelmi), a lodger at the Brixton house of Ursula Loyer (Clare Higgins), where the young, painfully gauche Van Gogh (Jochum Ten Haaf) comes to live, points out that their home is not quite what it seems on the surface. So it is with this play. On the surface it is calm and meticulous, underneath it seethes and boils.
There is a miraculous moment when it turns from quite possibly the dullest play in London into the most exciting. That moment is when the young Vincent, left alone with his middle-aged landlady, a woman prone to the blackest of depressions, offers her a glimpse of ecstasy, a reason to go on living.
This is a play that reflects the idea that you can't have the real highs in life unless you have also experienced the depths of despair. This is a middle-aged play, but I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Its gentleness of pace and intense realism may, indeed, not appeal to the very young, but it is middle-aged in the best way, in that it knows about living and loving and hurting very badly indeed. Like the warped kitchen table that the widowed, "progressive" and depressive Loyer loves so much, it finds beauty in the ugly. As Van Gogh inscribes his portrait of the naked Mrs Loyer with her drooping flesh: "No woman is old as long as she loves and is loved."
This is also a portrait of the artist in the making as well as a play of ideas. It asks: what makes an artist? Who facilitates them? Is being an enabler as important as being creative? It also considers what happens to lesser or squandered talent. The final scene of the play is exquisite: Van Gogh, wrapped in the endeavour of sketching a pair of boots, Loyer aware that he is taking flight, and the sour stench of disappointment arising from Sam and his wife, who have settled for less.
Peter Mumford's lighting, all falling shadows, is an artwork in its own right, and the acting is simply beautiful, as if the cast are living and breathing every moment.
· Until August 30. Box office: 020-7369 1785.
