Review
of Red at Wyndham’s Theatre
5/5 Stars
“What
do you see?”
This
is the first line of John Logan’s script, and Michael Grandage keeps the
question front and center in his new production of Red, a revival of the 2009 original. We are asked, time and time
again, to reexamine not just the artwork—shown onstage in dozens of monolithic
canvasses, all in various states of completion—but also the man behind it.
The
play picks up with Rothko in 1957, fourteen years after he and Adolph Gottlieb first
published their manifesto on art, eleven years after Robert Coates first coined
a term for the movement: Abstract Expressionism. It is approximately halfway
through Rothko’s career, and the play feels like something of a long night of
the soul for the painter. Pollock, his great contemporary and artistic foil, is
dead. His art, once heralded as visionary and rebellious, has become what Fortune Magazine called a good
investment. And by god, he can’t bear the vapid, bubblegum stylings of the up and
coming Pop Artists.
It
is this sense of loss that pervades Alfred Molina’s performance as Rothko. Having
originated the role in the play’s first run, Molina once again brings a desperate
intensity to the stage, all glowering face, wire-rimmed spectacles, and paint-spattered
clothing. He is at times difficult to watch and frequently difficult to like, striding
across the stage like a caged creature and shouting down his apprentice’s questions
as often as he answers them. Still, Molina keeps the eyes of the audience—and poor,
somewhat hapless Ken—riveted on him as he sings arias to Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy, elegies to Pollock,
and a lullaby of pulsating color on canvas. He is at once compelling and difficult
to believe. Clearly a visionary and just as clearly full of a certain amount of
hot air.
Alongside
Molina’s dramatic energy and conflict, it is Alfred Enoch’s Ken who grounds the
audience within the play. An actor better known for Harry Potter and How to Get Away
with Murder than for stage work, he brings a delightful naivety to Red, a note of youth in what might
otherwise be a show exclusively for the stuffy art critic. Enoch matches a
limber and energetic physicality to Ken’s eagerness, and yet it is tempered by long
silences and meditative stretches of stillness. Indeed, this production uses
silence the way that Rothko used negative space, letting the red and the black pulse
and breathe into one another.
Still,
for all the immense talents of its cast, it is the designs of Christopher Oram
and Neil Austin that are the true stars of this production. Oram’s set is rich
with the sort of details that make Wyndham’s boxy proscenium truly feel like an
artist’s studio. From the paint-spattered sink downstage left to the carefully
weathered mallet Ken uses to build canvas stretchers, no prop is too small for
careful attention. The paintings themselves—massive flats of red and black and
brown, clearly the lovechildren of a particularly dedicated scenic painter—dwarf
everything else onstage. And so they should. If the Seagram’s company failed to
build Rothko the artistic cathedral he so desperately craved, then Oram has
perhaps come the closest to the ideal. Austin, too, has worked hard to capture
the low, pulsing light that the artist demanded. He has made the paintings literally glow, through a lighting
effect so subtle and clever that it takes a solid portion of the first scene to
even notice it.
Red is perhaps the most profound artistic
manifesto ninety minutes can offer, though it is also perhaps more riddle than
statement. It is worth the cost of admission if only to answer that first and
vital question: What do you see?
-Christy
Duprey
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