Red, Corpus Playroom, Cambridge, Thu 26 – Sat 28 June
John Logan’s play Red, which explores the late career of the artist Mark Rothko, premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 2009. This production by the Fletcher Players, directed by Maya Calcraft, is never short of gripping, as Rothko (Thomas Sweeney) and his apprentice, Ken (Wilf Offord) engage in an enthralling verbal sparring match over the meaning of art.
The task for which young Ken has signed up seems an unenviable one in the first few scenes, as we watch the irascible Rothko scold him for his lack of learning and ridicule his opinions about art. Buoyed by a huge commission he is working on for New York’s famous Seagram Building – the walls of its restaurant are to be adorned with a series of his abstract paintings, known for their great slabs of colour – Rothko is extremely confident in his own opinions, convinced of the need to be significant and to have the courage to build upon the great art of the past. He must rise above the fickle views of “the whole damn panoply of disgruntled viewers”. He is an angry man, and the main object of his ire, here at the dawn of the 1960s, is the consumerism sweeping across America: the cheery commercials, and the way everyone loves the television and the gramophone, and the latest automobile. His cynicism stands in stark contrast to Ken’s optimism: when the two of them are listing red things, Ken says “Santa!” and Rothko swiftly counters with “Satan!” Rothko forces Ken to tell him who his favourite artist is, and on learning that it is Jackson Pollock, Rothko laments the fact that Pollock himself became a commodity. He loved art, but could not cope with fame, and sought to escape it. “Why did Jackson Pollock even have an Oldsmobile 88 convertible?” he asks, condemning the road accident in which Pollock died as an overly ambiguous suicide. “When I do it,” he adds ominously, “everyone will know it’s suicide.”
Pollock is known, of course, for splattering paint across the canvas energetically, and the dialogue in this play often comes tripping out in similarly frenzied bursts, leading to climactic moments that maintain the play’s momentum brilliantly. Music is used to good effect (Rothko having a veto over what can be played), while the presence of a Rothko-esque work on stage enhances the sense of verisimilitude. Sweeney (also an accomplished improv performer) puts in a star turn as Rothko, his pithy put-downs leaving audience members tittering uncertainly and his dark thoughts and bitterness never far from boiling over. Offord delivers an equally powerful performance as Ken: when the apprentice finally finds his voice, laying into Rothko for being conceited and for the hypocrisy of the Seagram commission (“Bullshit!”), and criticising his coldness (“Do you even know if I’m married, or where I live, after two years?”), it is intensely satisfying for the viewer. Rothko had bragged about “stomping” on the Cubists, but Ken points out that the proponents of Pop Art (Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein – “you know, the comic book guy?”) are about to do the same thing to the abstract expressionists. When the two men add a layer of paint to the canvas right before our eyes, the resulting hue reminds Ken of the dried blood he saw during a terrible incident in his past; Offord tells the story of this childhood trauma in a way that is moving and believable.
When Rothko takes a visit to the restaurant at the Seagram Building, he is dismayed to find that the affluent diners only have eyes for each other; amid “the snap and snarl of teeth”, they seem to be thinking only: “Should I fear you, should I acquire you?” Recounted with panache by Sweeney, it is an experience that will have dramatic consequences for Rothko’s restaurant commission, but we sense that the presence of Ken in Rothko’s studio, and his determination to question Rothko’s motives, also helps to shape Rothko’s thinking. One thing is for sure: nothing in this terrific production is black and white.
