RED at Wyndham’s Theatre | Hannah Isaac
(4.5/5)
Michael Grandage’s return to RED at the Wyndham’s Theatre is utterly momentous. Grandage first directed the play in 2009 at the Donmar Warehouse and then reprised the play on Broadway at the Golden Theatre in 2010, Alfred Molina cast as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne cast as Ken for both runs.
This year’s performance, running from 4 May to 28 July 2018, features the returned Molina as Mark Rothko once more. The role of Ken is filled by Alfred Enoch. The duo is electric, feeding off of one another in a series of volatile emotional outbursts and witty dialogue. When the pair is silent, the absence of their sounds amidst the diegesis of classical records is near cataclysmic. RED is a brilliant, well-staged compendium of the moments in which art is truly made. You must see this play.
To provide some backstory (as without it, the effect of the pair’s conversation is lost): Mark Rothko was an artist active from the 1920s until his death in 1970. He was born in Russia in 1903 and moved to New York when he was ten, an anecdote that the character Rothko shares with Ken in the play:
KEN: How old were you when you came here?
ROTHKO: Ten. We went to Portland, lived in the ghetto alongside all the other thinky, talky Jews. I was Marcus Rothkowitz then.
KEN: (Surprised.) You changed your name?
ROTHKO: My first dealer said he had too many Jewish painters on the books. So Marcus Rothkowitz becomes Mark Rothko. Now nobody knows I’m a Jew!
The question of heritage is one raised often in the play, sometimes as an explanation for each man’s art and sometimes as a defiance of art’s place in the world. What does the red of the paintings signify to each of the characters on stage, to the potential viewers of the paintings once they’re up in the Four Seasons? On that note, what of the black? The verisimilitude of the play is inlaid in its honesty regarding what the man Mark Rothko cared about, what truths he sought from the paintings that he created. He was compulsive, complex, ruminative. He was depressed, brilliant, and tormented.
Because Grandage has always been this play’s artistic director, and Alfred Molina has always been this play’s Mark Rothko, the newest elements to writer John Logan’s RED are the stage at Wyndham’s and Alfred Enoch as Ken.
The stage is a well-worn artist’s studio. At least a dozen canvases line the walls of the studio, their edges visible as deep red and black. Spare paint cans litter the corner of the paint-splattered floor and bottles of pigment line the stained rolling countertop. Rothko and Ken each use the industrial sink and towels to clean themselves up after they paint. It’s an honest, believable vision of the place in which these Brobdingnagian canvases are stretched and painted. The rope system and hooks are nearly always center-stage, ready for the pair to hang up canvases to prime and ponder. The lighting is dim, just as the man Rothko wanted it, and the music emanating from the record player overwhelms diegesis.
Alfred Enoch (known for his television/film roles as Wes Gibbins in How to Get Away with Murder and Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter series) is an eager undergraduate art student who becomes a rival for the jeux d’esprit so typical of Molina’s Rothko. He is a naïve apprentice and an unexpected confidante. It is sometimes unclear if Ken is actually becoming more emotionally complex as his two years with Rothko progress (I think in particular of his first reveal of his parents’ murder, which is too early on to trust as genuine) or if the script just demands a story out of a life lacking feasible narrative. Here, Ken almost has no other choice than to act as the foil for Rothko, to corner him into admitting the hypocrisy in accepting the offer to paint for the Four Seasons. Perhaps this is the natural progression of a play with just two characters.
For those concerned about verisimilitude, know that Rothko’s commission from Philip Johnson of the Four Seasons really happened. The man Rothko accepted the job, planning to “ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who eats there.” The night described by the character Rothko in which he visits the restaurant happened as well, only in life Mark Rothko went with his wife Mary Alice Beistle and not alone, as is suggested in John Logan’s version.
Finally: how fortunate it is to be unable to call one moment more important than another in a play! Truly, every minute of RED is as relevant to the plot as the next; even the seemingly mundane minutes – in which Ken builds the wooden canvas frame or stretches and staples another canvas, in which Rothko washes his face or changes a record – are raw and revealing in their own right. At just 90 minutes, there is no intermission in which to regain your own reality and lose that of the play. Instead you are within the studio, within the world of Rothko, from “What do you see?” to “Red.”
The last performance of RED’s twelve-week run is on 28 July, 2018. Ticket prices range from £10 to £99 and are available online at https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/tickets/red/.
Mark Rothko’s paintings are viewable for free at the Tate Modern museum in the In the Studio collection display. The set of 1959 Black on Maroon and Red on Maroon paintings are displayed with low lighting.
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