For eight weeks in Arles, Provence, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived and worked together. Over a century later, Jack Ellis, obsessed with van Gogh’s catalogue, examines the toll the eight weeks took on the Dutch master in this colourful work.
Much has been made of those fateful weeks in France in 1888, weeks which preceded van Gogh’s ear-removing psychosis. But what really went on between the pair during this time? Ellis, a confessed obsessive of van Gogh’s works having been exposed to them at school, has spent a great deal of time researching this moment in the two artists’ history, which mutated from a period of mentorship into something more volatile and parasitic.
Van Gogh & Me is part theatre, part lecture, with Ellis performing as both artists, delivering lines of dialogue from imagined conversations between the pair while explaining the events which unfolded. It is a neat blend but one that risks getting a little plodding in places. Ellis’s discussion about his own influences frames the piece, but it is a smart move to focus more on the painters themselves, which the majority of the work does.
Gauguin has been invited to van Gogh’s studio in Arles as part of a wider artistic group the Dutchman wishes to set up, yet out of 12 invitees, only the French painter arrives. What follows is eight weeks of relentless painting and, of course, van Gogh’s work, scrutiny about whether his art is any good or not. Did this lead to van Gogh’s self-mutilation and eventual death, Ellis wonders? Perhaps, but it is clear that the fear of being alone terrifies van Gogh, with Ellis’s script neat in exploring how static the painter’s life becomes while those around him, family and friends, move forward.
What is ironic, then, is that for van Gogh, whose life felt so colourless, his painting is just how delightfully colourful, and it is how Ellis cleverly weaves this into the design of the production where Van Gogh & Me lands. Framing the back wall are enormous easels, upon which are turned around canvases, all of which are slowly turned during the show to spotlight van Gogh’s work. It is a beautiful sight and one, at the show’s end, which is simply breathtaking: a vibrant sea of colour from a man whose final days were so devastatingly dark.
It is not the most exhilarating piece of theatre you will ever see, but there is something utterly captivating about Ellis as both painters, and the slow unravelling of van Gogh under Gauguin’s deliberately difficult tutoring. The payoff of the show is also its saddest moment, where some of van Gogh’s final paintings, a self-portrait and ‘Starry Night’, painted while in an asylum, were made. A painful reminder of the contrast between the beauty of his art and the torture of his mind.
Ellis ends the show wishing he could meet his artistic idol, yet through Van Gogh & Me Ellis has formed, and shared, a heartfelt and intimate connection to the great artist which captures, in a poignant way, his sincere affection for the man.
