South Bank, London This should have been a rollercoaster. Instead, it’s a sedate trudge through giant canvases – giving you the bottle but not the booze, the facts but not the feeling would love to meet Vincent van Gogh. I would shake his hand – a gesture we know meant a lot to him because he sometimes signed letters “with a handshake”. And I’d tell him: “Vincent, you are loved.” As it happens, Bill Nighy beat me to it, playing a critic in the 2010 Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor. Tony Curran, who starred as Vincent in that instalment, is on screen at the end of the Meet Vincent Van Gogh Experience, along with the late Kirk Douglas, who portrayed the artist in Lust for Life. Their presence reminds you that Van Gogh has become a bit like Hamlet: an epic challenge for actors, with a last act to make anyone weep. The exhibition chooses to start at that awful ending. We’re in a field in France under low, grey-blue rain clouds. Black triangles of crows sweep across the steel sky in an animation drawn from one of his last canvases, Wheatfield With Crows, from 1890. Van Gogh speaks, describing his final loss of hope. A shot rings out. His life flashes before him, and we walk through his memories, seeing the starry night, the little bedroom and other images burned on the dying artist’s consciousness. Anyway, that seems to be the conceit. The reality is nothing so immersive. It’s all quite sedate. You stand in a room surrounded by the wheat field on screen, with the soundtrack on a headset, then walk gently into the next space, where cafe tables recreate a bohemian hangout in 1880s Paris. My table had a skull, a bottle and an absinthe spoon – but they were all fastened down. That says it all for this experience – you get the bottle but not the booze, the facts but not much of the feeling. What would an actually immersive Van Gogh experience be like? A rollercoaster ride of emotional highs and lows, a vertigo-inducing Starry Night big wheel, a drop into the abyss, an absinthe trip with the Green Fairy. It would have to pull you into the vortex of his despair, raise you to his perceptions of nature’s glory. Instead, this show has the laid-back feel of a spiegeltent serving slightly flat beer. There should be a standup telling Vincent jokes. It is, in fact, housed in a giant tent. Queuing for a ticket and renting an obligatory locker, it’s hard to resist the feeling you are about to change into ice skates. A Van Gogh ice rink might even work – after all, the Dutch have long loved ice skating, to judge from old pictures. The stars and irises could whirl around as you glided. As it is, we trudge like potato eaters into a space lit by the golden yellows he found when he first travelled to Arles, Provence, in February 1888. There’s a haystack to sit on while you watch slides of some of his incandescent southern scenes and hear him read aloud letters to his brother Theo about his rhapsodic state. The Yellow House, his painting of the artists’ community he created, is transformed into a glowing cottage-sized structure – the most impressive technological coup here. But inside it the agonising decay of his friendship with Paul Gauguin – the only artist he lured to his dream studio – is drably dramatised as a low-energy shadow play. Vincent’s exuberant presence is lacking throughout this low-key son et lumière. Where’s the virtual reality Vincent we’ve been waiting for, resurrected to rant about the painter’s mission? Or the animatronic Vincent, painting furiously in the fields? The real place to meet Van Gogh, of course, is in his paintings. Every laden brushstroke is a piece of his soul. There are beautifully precise enlargements of details that show just how fraught with passion those ridges of orange, blue and black really are. These magnified brush marks make you see how Van Gogh helped invent abstract art. But the framed replicas that hang throughout the event look rubbery. This exhibition is not a true experience of Van Gogh, but a simplified guide to the outline of his life that left me hungry enough to eat paint. Instead, I made a pilgrimage across the Thames to stand in front of his Sunflowers at the National Gallery. Now there’s a true meeting with his soul. I hope he feels the love.