When Van Gogh met Gauguin: Channel 4's new drama

Black coffee can seriously damage your health. If you need any proof, just take a look at this photo of John Simm. The actor, previously best known as the hale and hearty Sam Tyler in BBC1's Life on Mars, subsisted on just black coffee in order to look the part for his latest role. But, boy, did it pay off. As you can see, he appears to be on death's door - exactly the right look for playing Vincent Van Gogh in The Yellow House, a potent and affecting new drama which goes out on Channel 4 next Thursday.

After a regime consisting solely of the black stuff, Simm lost a stone in a week. Throw in Van Gogh's trademark stubbly beard, paint-spattered straw hat and blue smock, and the actor immediately took on a mien which screamed "tortured artist". "I got to shave my head and go on a crash diet," says the 36-year-old, who admits that the experience left him feeling "a bit trippy. I went completely De Niro, which is a great place to be!"

The drama certainly demands the sort of troubled characters with which De Niro made his name. Simon Bent's script paints a picture of a remarkable period in November and December 1888. During these two months, Van Gogh and his fellow iconoclast, Paul Gauguin (played by John Lynch, from Bleak House and Sliding Doors), decided to throw off the shackles of daily life and devote them selves to the pursuit of Art with a capital A.

Putting up with what the rest of us would find insupportable - loneliness, insecurity, mental instability and abject poverty - they locked themselves away in "the Studio of the South" at the now legendary "Yellow House" in Arles in the South of France. They fought, drank and whored like there was no tomorrow. Their evenings would often end with a manic Van Gogh smashing up the furniture in a blind rage. But above all, they painted with a fervour that went way beyond the merely passionate. That creative frenzy proved astonishingly fecundity. During the white heat of those two months, Van Gogh and Gauguin could be said to have invented the concept of modern art. Between them, they produced more than 40 works which are now revered as masterpieces. Van Gogh casually stowed his celebrated cycle of "Sunflower" paintings under his bed. On today's market, these pieces would command millions of pounds. Not bad for a couple of months' work.

And yet this period of breathtaking creativity came at a very high price. The painters' intense working relationship, which always thrived on an acute and uneasy rivalry, eventually tipped over into bitter antipathy, climaxing in the now notorious moment where Van Gogh cut off his ear while muttering about "Judas". When the artists parted after this traumatic episode, they were husks. They had poured so much of themselves into their endeavours, they emerged from Arles with nothing left to give. Within 18 months, Van Gogh had shot himself in the chest. But he even managed to mess that up; he failed to kill himself outright, and instead bled to death over several excruciating days. A few years later, Gauguin followed his erstwhile best friend to the grave, dying penniless, syphilitic and alone in self-imposed exile in Tahiti.

Relaxing at the end of filming, Simm says he has been inspired by the sheer intensity of Van Gogh, a figure who has over the years attracted actors as diverse as Kirk Douglas (Lust for Life) and Tim Roth (Vincent & Theo). "What actor wouldn't want to play Van Gogh?" wonders Simm who, after such multi-award-winning dramas as Life on Mars, Sex Traffic, State of Play, Crime and Punishment and The Lakes, has once again shown he has an unerring eye for a script. "If they'd asked me at any time, I'd have said yes. A part like this is manna from heaven for any actor. He's the ultimate tortured artist."

The actor continues that he did preparatory sketches for the part by immersing himself in Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo. According to the actor: "Van Gogh was a smelly little man with no social skills whatsoever. He also had what we would now call bipolar disorder - he must have been a nightmare to live with.

"Reading Van Gogh's letters to his brother is like watching him unravel before your very eyes. All this bile comes out, and slowly but surely, he disintegrates under attack from his mental illness.

"Van Gogh's paintings are actually more inspirational and more powerful because we now know how painful it was for him to produce them. A year after he died, they discovered lithium, the cure for bipolar disorder. But his depressive side was part of the total package. If he had been able to take lithium, he wouldn't have been the same person. The drug might have dulled his mind, lessened his colour and reduced the power of his art.

"It's no surprise that film-makers have always been drawn to him. People love the tragedy of his life. He had talent to burn, and yet during his lifetime he only ever sold one painting - and that was for half a bottle of absinthe. He had all this colour exploding in his head, but at the same time his external life was submerged in utter bleakness."

Lynch adds: "Van Gogh made his own rules - he could complete a canvas in just 45 minutes. He had the facility to punch his way through to a different dimension really quickly. But the flip side of that was that he had no emotional protection. He was able to go to some other reality incredibly swiftly, but it cost him mentally. He was so raw, he went instantly into another consciousness and accessed a deeper reality."

It was this very fearlessness that eventually alienated Van Gogh from his one-time mentor, Gauguin. "They pushed each other to make ever more daring use of colour," says 45-year-old Lynch. "They were both tremendously driven by the importance of what they were doing - that was vital to their spirit. They extracted what they needed from themselves to put on their canvases. And they shared a great stubbornness and phenomenal talent. They also recognised in each other the loneliness and the isolation of the artist."

Simm adds: "The story is so tragic because Van Gogh needed Gauguin so much, and was devastated when he found out the awful truth that Theo had in fact paid Gauguin a weekly fee to be his brother's friend. Van Gogh fell apart after that, and Gauguin never recovered. He went to Tahiti, and to his dying day he had a copy of a Van Gogh picture on the front of his notebooks."

Simm concludes: "All a lot of people know about Van Gogh is that he cut his ear off. We're hoping The Yellow House will show that there was rather more to the man than that. Van Gogh was dead by the age of 37, but just look what he's left behind.

"Gauguin was absolutely right when he said to Van Gogh, 'one day, mon frère, people will paint like us, people will dress like us, people will think like us and they will understand what we're trying to do. We're the future. We're the revolution, the silent, bloodless coup of the imagination'."

The Yellow House is on C4 at 9pm next Thursday

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