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Fun with Vermeer

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Girl with a Pearl Earring
Theatre Royal Haymarket

Waste
Almeida

Creditors
Donmar

I don’t know much about art but I know what I dislike. Art history. It forces one to view paintings and sculpture through the medium of literature. Every word spoken in appreciation of art is a step away from true art appreciation, which is inevitably unconscious, illiterate, oblivious to itself. The more you know, the less you feel. Those who enjoy art understand these limitations and long for fresh ways to approach their pursuit. Soap opera provides a surprisingly satisfying point of entry and here’s the latest daub-drama, Girl with a Pearl Earring, a fictional narrative about Vermeer’s enigmatic portrait of sexy innocence.

The critics have gleefully emptied several bucketloads of manure over this production. Justly so. The characterisation is facile, the narrative is Jackanoryish, the pace turtle-slow and the script cliché-rich. Yet I enjoyed this show because the blend of facts, supposition and hints from Vermeer’s surviving work provide plenty of brain- teaserish fun for the amateur art-hound. Above all it encouraged me to contemplate a work of art simply and lovingly without wanting to assess my feelings in the dead dialect of art scholarship.

The acting is as good as the script will permit. Niall Buggy gets plenty of laughs as a sleazy millionaire drunkard and Adrian Dunbar (Vermeer) is strangely mesmerising even though his character is nothing but a sweet encrustation of moral nobility. His hairstyle — and I don’t think it’s a wig — must qualify as one the wonders of the world. Labouring stylists have individually polished every nut-brown follicle, and the layered fronds, apparently aligned from outer space by satellites, lie across his shoulders shimmering with plasticated perfection like a larval downpour of Angel Delight. Sensational. And the house was pretty full despite atrocious reviews.

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