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London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Joe Dowling.
Cast: Adrian Dunbar, Kimberley Nixon, Sara Kestelman, NIall Buggy, Lesley Vickerage, Maggie Service, Jonathan Bailey, Flora Spencer-Longhurst
Description: A stage play adaptation by David Joss Buckley of the novel by Tracy Chevalier, with Adrian Dunbar as the artist Vermeer, and Kimberley Nixon as his young muse, Griet. Directed by Joe Dowling.
Trains: Tube: Piccadilly Circus 
Phone: 0870400 0626
Website: www.trh.co.uk/contactus.php
Email: boxoffice@trh.co.uk
David Joss Buckley’s stage adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, which became both an international best seller and Peter Webber’s superlative 2004 movie, works like a destructive charm.
It turns imaginative art-history theorising into the stuff of which TV soaps are made.
Buckley shoves novel and film into the bio-pic school of “You seem a little restless tonight, Chopin/Van Gogh/Disraeli. Is anything wrong?”.
Webber’s film imparted a haunting sense of guilt, sexual inscrutability and reticence to Chevalier’s text, in which Vermeer exploits a voluptuous, teenage servant as the model/muse for his Girl with a Pearl Earring.
By contrast Buckley, whose scriptwriting history includes EastEnders, Casualty and A Mind to Kill, lays everything on with a heavy palette and thick brush, though Kimberley Nixon’s impressive Griet maintains her self-posessed cool.
The tense, impoverished Vermeer household, from Lesley Vickerage’s jealous wife Catharina and scheming daughter Cornelia to Sara Kestelmans’s commanding, manipulative mother-in-law and Niall Buggy’s gross patron, Van Ruijven, who lusts for Griet in living and portrait form, are one-dimensional.
Some address us head-on in soliloquy, drawing grave attention to the obvious. Reverent deadly clichés are exchanged, rendering the dilemma of painter, girl and family banal.
“Creativity held me captive, I had to paint her,” Adrian Dunbar’s flamboyantly wooden Vermeer announces. The air is full of falling gravity.
“All that will survive is beauty". "Without you I wouldn’t lift a brush”. Worst of all: “You have bared your soul in the picture”.
Webber’s hypnotic movie breathes an captivating air of leisure and space, evokes not just a 17th-century Dutch town but makes the interior scenes resemble Vermeer’s pictures brought to life.
Joe Dowling’s bustling production, with Peter Mumford’s revolving stage and black-and-white-tiled walls redolent of a Victorian lavatory, has no such verisimilitude.
Colin Firth’s long-haired Vermeer and Scarlett Johansson’s extraordinary Griet were fraught with unspoken erotic desire.
No such emotions are transmitted by Dunbar’s Vermeer, an inappropriate combination of the professorial and avuncular but little more.
The painter touches Miss Nixon’s attentive, pertly loquacious Griet with no serious ardour.
The pain the poor girl expresses when her ear is symbolically pierced by Vermeer so she can wear his wife’s earring for the portrait is merely that of another female exploited by male, artistic selfishness.
Until 1 November (0845 481 1870).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I felt the main weakness of this production was in the script. The sentiments conveyed by the monologues should have arisen organically through the development of dramatic action, not using these shortcuts. Necessary information (such as "He died so young") was clumsily imparted without having any place int he action. I would have thought a TV scriptwriter had learnt the lesson of "showing, not telling".
Also, I found Niall Buggy's insensitive overacting made his character unconvincing as a man enamoured with beauty, enough so to be spending large sums on paintings. And the painter's wife would have been much more interesting if she had been given more depth, and humanity.
As a stage playwright, I would have loved to do a job on this script before it went into production. Watching it made my fingers itch to rectify the glaring weaknesses and turn it into the good play it could have been.
- Ann Jocelyn, London
