Did you see the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern earlier this year? It focused on the Seagram Murals, the giant, fathomless landscapes the New York artist produced for the Four Seasons Restaurant in 1958 and ’59. What a wonderful companion piece John Logan’s play would have made to that exhibition.
It is set entirely in Rothko’s paint-splattered studio in downtown Manhattan where he created the murals. One of his great ochre–red works serves as a glowering and glowing backdrop. And it begins with Rothko, played by a shaven-headed Alfred Molina, glowering back at the painting until the silent exchange is broken by the appearance of Eddie Redmayne’s Ken, the artist’s gauche, young new assistant.
There are pitfalls as deep as one of Rothko’s depressions in producing plays about artists. Deepest of all is that the play ends up being little more than a parasite feeding off the reflected glory of the art that inspired it. Time and again playwrights are taken in by the notion that because a work of art is great, there is a great play to be written about how the art came into being. There are usually embarrassing scenes in which the tormented artist grapples with the creative process. And almost inevitably you end up thinking time would be better spent looking at the actual art than a tawdry tale about the artist. This tale, though not tawdry, is pretty predictable, the main theme being the narcissism and fragility of the artist’s ego.
There are times when Logan’s two-hander appears to teeter on the edge of the pitfalls. When Molina’s bullying Rothko attacks the artistic faux-pas of his nervous assistant, the master’s lessons come in clichés — how Picasso’s work taught him the importance of movement, or how he was inspired by the “inner luminescence” of a Caravaggio. This is dialogue that could have been lifted from an exhibition programme.
And when Rothko reveals himself to be Rothkowitz, from a Russian-Jewish ghetto, the information arrives with a whiff of exposition, the thing that haunts all biographical plays.
The arguments are so highly charged as to be shocking
But each time the play teeters, Michael Grandage’s simply staged production pulls it back from the brink. As
Redmayne’s diffident Ken asserts himself, the tension crackles. Sometimes the verbal combat gets mired in artspeak. But even though an argument between artist and assistant about the symbolism of colour might sound about exciting as watching paint dry, Logan’s writing is thrillingly articulate. And if you are interested in art, Ken’s damning criticism of his employer’s maudlin use of the colour black to symbolise mortality — Ken wittily calls it “chromatic anthropomorphism” — is, well, very interesting.
So too are the scene changes, which reveal a lot about how an artist’s studio works. Huge brooding Rothkos are hoisted by the actors onto a towering easel. And although it is not explained that the process during which the canvas is “primed” with a base colour has to be completed as quickly as possible, it is a fact strongly implied as the duo frantically attack the expanse of white with dripping paintbrushes, the exhausting process ending with as much red on themselves as on the canvas.
And all the while there is the elephant in the room — the question of whether by accepting “the flashiest mural commission since the Sistine Chapel” to adorn the walls of a posh restaurant the artist has sold out.
Logan uses his presumably fictional assistant to reveal the arguments that must have raged in Rothko’s head before he cancelled the commission. And even though Ken, turning out to be his employer’s harshest critic, is all part of this play’s predictable arc, the brutality and ferociousness of the arguments are so highly charged as to be shocking.
I have nagging doubts about pitting a character based on a real artist with real problems against a fictional character with fictional problems (Ken’s parents were murdered by burglars, it is disclosed) — it somehow undermines the integrity of Logan’s play.
But in portraying Ken, Redmayne turns fragility into strength, diffidence into audacity, and a performance that could have so easily been the also-ran next to Molina’s powerful Rothko, into possibly the best of the year.
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