Vincent

This monologue in the voice of Vincent Van Gogh’s brother Theo was written by actor Leonard Nimoy around 1970, for himself to perform in the days he was trying to break away from his Star Trek persona.

For the past dozen years, Jim Jarrett has toured with the show, bringing to Edinburgh a highly polished and fully developed characterisation and presentation.

Inspired by the fact that Theo oddly did not speak at Vincent’s grave, Nimoy imagines him too overcome by grief then, but driven to make up for it later, at an event that is openly a celebration of the artist’s life and work.

Theo’s portrait of his brother is unabashedly adulatory, finding joy in all of Vincent’s foibles, interpreting everything as a product of the intense experience in life that made him a great artist and absolutely denying, notwithstanding all the evidence, that he ever was mad.

Where Nimoy originally played Theo as a rather formal man, lecturing sternly on the facts of Vincent’s life, Jarrett’s Theo is defined by the joy of loving his brother and of having the opportunity to share that love. He has a smile on his face throughout and roams the stage, delightedly picking up fragments of Vincent’s letters to illustrate the artist’s total immersion in everything he did and felt, good or bad.

Jarrett allows us to sense a state of denial in his speaker, as Theo brushes past the ear-cutting episode or Vincent’s stay in an asylum a bit too glibly and tries to put a positive spin on the darkest periods in his brother’s life, but that makes even stronger our sense of the brotherly love that is the real subject of the play.

Jarrett is backed by projections of dozens of Vincent’s paintings and drawings which, being undeniably works of genius, constantly threaten to upstage the actor, but his willingness to run that risk is a measure of his confidence in the power of his story and his performance.