Within the first five minutes of this show starting, I was convinced I may have been locked into a well-lit audio book. It turned out that Peter Scott-Presland’s performance as the British painter Keith Vaughan and the words he spoke, Vaughan’s own from his famous journals, just took a little time to get used to. The script is thick with heavy vocabulary and complex clauses, and it was like being read a diary rather than a play; Scott-Presland never really broke the fourth wall and the only extra dimensions were added by sporadic classical music and a slideshow of Vaughan’s paintings.
And it grew on me. Although the play launched into the journal monologue without any preamble, which made it difficult for the audience to get a firm hold on the story before it began, the value of the play is in the words of the dead painter. The writing is full of vivid descriptions, candid observations, and unique turns of phrases that twist your imagination into his memories. Over the course of the show the neo-romantic paintings began to warm on me and as I began to understand his character the colours and shapes began to make sense as if the words were to illustrate the pictures.
The stories of the painter jump around the globe, from the UK to Marrakesh and Mexico, without explanation (probably a fault of the timing cutbacks explained in the programme) and Scott-Presland’s performance was honest and believable. Even including that, and the paintings themselves, the words had more power than anything else on the stage. If you’re not in a heavy and brooding mood beforehand, you will be afterwards. If you can appreciate Vaughan’s art, or a high literary style of writing, I would recommend going to see this.
