Vincent in Brixton won Best New Play at this year's Olivier awards and was also nominated in the same category for a Tony award in New York. Nicholas Wright has written an intelligent play and Richard Eyre has coaxed out performances from his actors that are understated and moving. Eyre and Wright are a creative team who know how to explores ideas fully and bring fresh life to something you think you know about. Set in Brixton in 1873 the play fills in the blanks about Vincent's life during his time in London.

What the piece shows us is not a Great Artist striving to bring forth Great Art or a troubled tortured mind, this is not the Vincent who cut off his ear or painted the sunflowers but an intense young man struggling to find the way he should live, whether within the constraints of his Dutch Calvinist background or the vistas his soul seems instinctively to yearn for. He is influenced by his arrival in what, for Victorian England, is an unusually liberated household; falling at first sight for the daughter of the house (Emma Darwall-Smith), he gradually comes to realise that he has a deeper affinity with her widowed mother. Almost by the way, Wright also effortlessly works in examinations of class and other social issues surrounding art. Pitting Vincent against Charlie Watt's Cockney artist Plowman we see the contrast between art for the people and art for the elite. It's ironic hearing Vincent defend art that only a few people appreciate as his work is now among the most reproduced images in the world.

Still keeping the traverse staging of Tim Hatley's fully practical kitchen set (almost every scene involves actual cooking on the range, mouth wateringly good) the Playhouse loses a little of the intimacy but this is a quiet piece and a magnificent one. As Vincent, Ruben Brinkman combines a naive, laconic bluntness with an evident intensity beneath the surface. As his landlady Ursula, Clare Higgins gives one of the finest performances I have seen in ages, portraying depression with absolute, precise insight and combining it with a simultaneous passion. You can see that she's inhabited this role and really understands the changes in mood and atmosphere but this is not a mechanical performance by a long shot.

The piece has a sense of ease and beauty about it that is so rare to see on stage. Nothing is hurried, everything has a place and space in time. The play deserves to be seen in it's original traverse staging but sadly Oxford doesn't have a space versatile enough for it. Nevertheless go and see this piece of theatre and you'll be richly rewarded.

Ben Whitehouse