Fine art of passion

It is a brave playwright who shows love flaring in the vicinity of the kitchen sink and gas cooker. Domestic realism on stage does not normally go hand-in-hand with heavy kissing or unbuttoning of clothes.

But Nicholas Wright's dream of a play, which imagines 20-year-old Vincent Van Gogh falling passionately for Ursula, the depressive, middle-aged widow in whose Brixton home he comes to lodge, makes the kitchen environment steam with erotic hankering.

Vincent in Brixton, which won golden opinions at the National Theatre in 2002 and on its New York transfer, is just a fantasy of what happened to the future artist when he was a fledgling art dealer. But Richard Eyre's atmospheric production, with Clare Higgins repeating her impassioned, award-laden performance as the melancholic Ursula to Jochum Ten Haaf's remarkable Vincent, returns a genuine touch of glory to London's stage.

Ten Haaf 's gauchely impetuous lodger, with his transfixing stare, and Miss Higgins's Ursula, casting aside her wintery desolation and funereal clothes in exchange for almost girlish vivacity, behave as if mesmerised by what they see in each other. Peter Mumford lights them in an autumnal evening glow as if they were figures in an old master's picture.

The play, with designer Tim Hatley's Victorian kitchen the scene for real cooking, romantically celebrates unconventional love and its redemptive power. Vincent loves Ursula for her age and her unhappiness and only the prim forces of interference, represented by his sister (Emma Handy) help draw them apart. The play's sole weakness is that it declares rather than dramatises the affair's value. Ursula has no sooner expressed her longing "to be the cause of something remarkable" than Vincent begins sketching what will become one of his great pictures.

Until 30 August. Box office: 020 7369 1785.

Vincent In Brixton