Cast: Ursula Loyer Claire Higgins Vincent Van Gogh Jochum Ten Haaf Eugenie Loyer Emily Blunt Sam Plowman Paul Nicholls Anna Van Gogh Emma Handy

Directed by Richard Eyre

'They (critics) should always be ignored. All they ever do is interfere with the personality of the author and the independence of the reader.'

Anton Chekov

What is really disturbing about Eyre's production of Wright's play at the Cottelsoe is that a sizeable section of the audience stood and cheered 'bravos' at the end. What is also surprising is that this impersonation of playwriting has received universally good reviews.

To me this suggests that dumbing down is really working and after decades of concerted effort has infected all sections of our culture. Perhaps t'was ever thus, but I doubt it. Culture - or the arts as they used to be called - has developed its own propaganda in which it seems socially dangerous not to go with the flow. To suggest that the best productions at the National are always by foreign companies, that the best dramas on television are American, that English arts culture is often a triumph of self-mythology over content is regarded as the treachery of an unpatriotic malcontent. There is a kind of shallow, cultural fascism abroad and the cheering at the curtain call of Wright's play had a distant echo of an artistic Nuremberg. Not that there is anything remotely dangerous, political or fascistic about Wright's play. In fact there is not anything remotely about it at all. One definition of 'camp' is 'failed seriousness'. That is precisely what Wright's play is: camp. And so is the audience. High camp.

The theatrical Cambridge mafia which has kept its grasping little hands tightly around the throat of the theatre in this country since the sixties, is a background presence in this theatrical example of mutton dressed as lamb. Our great theatrical institutions have been and are still run by this sinister organisation. Two of our acting knights are members. Viewed from a basis of pure merit I am forced to the opinion that the honours bestowed on these two luvvie gentlemen in part must have been for services to the bacon industry, but that's only my opinion (and the opinion of many others who keep quiet about it to avoid the knock on the door in the night from the Culture Police)

The Cantab mafia is safe, sound and secure: it has traditionally been reviewed (and championed) by chaps who were at university with its members. They are appointed by fellow graduates or that English type which believes in the old universities as a kind of spiritual nirvana without match in the universe. The circles are completed. In the sixties it was almost impossible for a young actor to get into the National when run by the giant it has become fashionable to dismiss as a mannered egomaniac - Laurence Olivier (non Cantab, Non Oxon non anything but a breathtaking actor and underestimated director). I was once surprised to hear George C. Scott spurn the Brandos and Deans and cite Olivier as his favourite actor. 'Why Olivier? I asked. 'Because he has done more for theatre than any other human being in the twentieth century.' was his simple answer. But Olivier stood in the way of the march of the mafia and was whacked. Now we dance on his grave.

Michael Gambon left Olivier's National because he couldn't get decent parts in a company which was bringing through people like Colin Blakely, Maggie Smith, Tony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Robert Stephens and a host of others. Ian McKellen couldn't get in the door, and there are many who believe that is where he should have remained. Our spin doctors and hype shamans still coin phrases about our theatre being 'the envy of the world'. Well, it was at one time, but the reputation of the British theatre was founded not on exciting new writing or genius directors, but on actors. Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Redgrave, Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike and latterly, the grand old man of Balcombe Paul Scofield, still MR. not SIR Paul Scofield, were the ones who hauled our tired old stages up into the stellar reaches.

When Olivier was edged out of the National the whisper went round the acting profession that 'you didn't need to be good to get into the National anymore. You just needed to have been in a successful television' and that has become more true than ever.

Our theatre is slipping away from us under the burden of celebrity and greed. Never mind the quality, feel the width. The West End is carpeted in celebrity wall-to-wall over-hyped overrated mediocrity. We are a theatrical nation living in denial. Shaftsbury Avenue vomits television presenters and comedians 'going legit' at us. The 'Vagina Monologues' has been expressed by such Thespian drips as the appalling Jerry Hall, Naomi Campbell and Mariella Frostrup, filling the theatrical night with magic. Some might hold that speaking through their cunts is an improvement on speaking through their arses.

Any idiot can act is the message, or if not, it doesn't matter. Any idiot can kick a ball but that does not make them a soccer player, and we are contaminating our stages with hordes of dramatic ball-kickers. Perhaps we shall soon see Richard and Judy in Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' or Ian Hislop and Paul Merton in Stoppard's 'Rosencrantz and Guilderstern', or we may wait with bated breath for the 'Othello' of Trevor MacDonald. Let's do away with the drama schools and replace them with 'Big Brother.'

A soap star recently received a theatrical award despite frequently failing to appear, failing to fulfil the one thing actors have traditionally done, turn up on time and do it. A young actor on the edge of making it large at the National recently was cornered by two of the old hands (one of them a knight) and offered some advice. What was that advice? Was some mystery of the art and sullen craft discussed, was some sacred secret handed down from Thespis passed on? No. He was told to get himself a good publicist. Approval from Richard and Judy is the new criterion of acting greatness. And the Richard and Judy criteria were in full evidence at the Cottesloe last night, not acting their designer socks off but cheering and bravoing and shedding the crocodile tears of empty bourgeois lives up to their necks in camp. We've always known a proportion of the National audience turns up because it's the thing to do. Saturday nights were always bad nights because that was when the wife dragged hubby to be seen seeing and we would stand on stage and watch the heads drop in sleep. But one wonders if theatre will ever regain an adult's respect. Not while it is led by spin doctors and cultural illusionists. The gentleman's club concept is alive and well in the high corridors of theatrical power and 'Vincent in Brixton' is a club presentation - anathema to serious, talented theatre.

Nicholas Wright was literary manager at the National under Peter Hall and Richard Eyre. 'Vincent in Brixton' is jobs for the boys, a form of administrative nepotism. I have not seen any of Nicholas Wright's other plays but on the evidence of this piece, he does not strike me as a natural writer. Literary management seems his place. Playwrights - proper ones - are a different species. Mr Wright creates the illusion of a play. In the programme are letters from Vincent. On stage Vincent speaks like his letters. Strangers meet for the first time and within minutes are talking as if they have known each other for years. Nothing makes psychological sense. And it has to be said that Jochum Ten Haaf does not make a very interesting young man, tormented genius in the making or not.

There seems to be no inner life in any of the characters although the inner life is spoken of endlessly, sometimes in monologues which borrow heavily in style from a hotchpotch of other plays and exhausted theatrical techniques, drawn for pertinence from Vincent's own paintings and desperate future - despair under star scattered skies - blackness and black birds in sketches etc and endlessly etc.. Ursula is the 'mirror' of Vincent. Well, stone me! In her despair, lo and behold, he sees himself, and some of his paintings - despair under star scattered etcs - and recognises the sweet narcotic of despair. We are in an intellectual and creative bus station.

Vincent is presented in the final act as a lost soul desperately holding on to a belief in Jesus as the balm for all things and we all know that fanatical Christians are nuts who will one day lose it totally and do something daft like cut off an ear. Unfortunately I felt dinned by the cracked ring of dramatic inauthenticity at these sonorous portents of a dark creative future being drawn from the pain in Brixton. With the exception of a few moments care of Clare Higgins ability to rise above her material, I spent the entire evening unable to experience a moment of dramatic truth.

The letters selected in the programme reveal the young Vincent as an intelligent and observant man, enjoying himself and whose strongest connection to life is already visual. His eye cannot leave the grasses and flowers, the trees and the light that will grace his future canvases. He is a painter waiting to happen. In the programme there is also a very arresting photo of the young Van Gogh. The face tells us something about the nineteen year old's inner landscape, already he seems to be searching for something. It is a young face expressing an inner dynamic. Balls, I can hear you say, he's only pissed off because of the neck clamp and the length of the exposure. Study a face, you can see something within - it's what painters do, they say, see what is thought to be unseen. Art is about looking. But there is no inner dynamic in Ten Haaf's performance. One isn't naëve enough to expect some burning, intense, embryonic madman who hates his ears to burst onstage, but what we get is something unremarkable. They went all the way to get a real Dutch actor. Why go out for hamburger when there's plenty of steak at home hanging round the local dole office?

Richard Eyre is not noted as a director able to light the blue touch paper under actors. What you tend to get in his productions is solidity. A bit like the England football team - workmanlike, loads of hard running, industry, well rehearsed but not Brazil. Eyre almost seems afraid of great acting. But then, where are the great actors? Didn't we at one time have lots of them? Why have they died out? A virus? Has this something to do with the control of the directocracy? For the modern director, great acting is a loss of control and all mafiosi insist on control. Dishing out knighthoods does not make actors great.

I cannot describe Ten Haaf's Vincent because it doesn't seem to be anything, except genuinely Dutch, whereas Emma Handy as his sister is asked to adopt a Dutch accent and give us the funny foreigner with funny accent that Orwell cited as a clear example of English prejudice. She tackles this odious task well, but this is simply one of many low, tasteless points in Wright's writing and Eyre's direction. Again, she arrives in Brixton from Holland and within minutes is behaving with a familiarity and openness one would only expect from someone who has been resident with the family for years. They cut to the chase in this production without ever getting on the horses.

The two other women burn up a bit of passion onstage, Ursula permanently grieving the loss of her husband like a middle aged Victorian female Hamlet, cherishing her neurotic grief, and Emily Blunt as her gorgeous bad tempered daughter is mildly irritated with everything. Vincent loves her, is rejected, so turns his love need on the widowed mother and strains to convince us, himself and poor sexually and emotionally starved Ursula, that he loves her. These are the unlikely dramatic developments we are invited to accept as the piece, marooned by a trundling naturalism, inches between longeurs of romanticised melancholy of a kind only found in theatres and delivered by actresses dressed in black.

Chekov sees Masha in 'The Seagull' who dresses in black because she is 'in mourning for my life' as a ridiculous figure. Mr Wright cannot quite match that unsentimental view.

Heathcote Williams sees the absurdity in Vincent in his triptych of the great artist starting to cut off his ear, in the process of cutting it off and finally having cut it off. Would that Mr. Williams had been let loose on this piece.

At the end, now returned to England as a penurious preacher and teacher, on the rickety bridge from respectable art dealing in his father's firm to the career as an artist which brought him such personal torture and us such gifts, Vincent returns for one last theatrical peroration with the woman whom he claims to have loved and has deserted. Entropy has set in all round. Everyone is very down. I was on the floor. The evening crawls towards its conclusion, or death, with Van Gogh sketching his boots as, stuffed with newspaper, they dry on Ursula's table. This of course is the model for his painting A Pair of Boots which hangs in the Baltimore Museum of Art. What a shame Ursula didn't have a nice vase of sunflowers handy.

If Don MaClean had entered singing 'Vincent' it would have been appropriate. Instead we got the bourgeois hordes going mad with delight. God help us. I met an artist I know on the way out and asked him what he thought of the play. 'Crap.' was his measured assessment, 'Van Gogh is his paintings. Without them he's nothing.' A brave thesis, and one that Messrs Eyre and Wright certainly proved.

Stage Door Johnny.