Treatment
is everything. After the perfectly mediocre writing in Looped (the current, soon-to-be recent play about
Tallulah Bankhead), it's astonishing to see another play that follows
essentially the same dramaturgical tropeÑa character study of an iconic
cultural figure in which a "subservient" character (who never
existed) is the foil whose questions and reactions prompt the icon to
ever-more-deeply reveal him- or herself, while becoming increasingly
frustrating to the foil; leading at last to a moment when the foil has an
epiphany of personal revelation that, guess what, the manipulative icon was
angling for all the time. In Looped
it seems an obvious contrivance.
In
John Logan's Red,
however, it isn't until the play is over that you become consciously aware of
the structural design. Not that it's a hard one to perceive, but the dialogue
is so rich and the characterizations so finely sculpted that youÕre distracted
away from mechanics andÑapt metaphor, thisÑdrawn into the canvas.
The time is the mid-late 60s, and the icon in question is abstract
expressionist painter Mark RothkoÑa
man of furious, angry intellect (played with astonishing verve and fire by Alfred
Molina), who is working on a
series of large paintings especially commissioned for the Four Seasons
restaurant in New York City. As the play begins, he is studying a (perhaps)
finished canvas for the series, in which red has a ÒdialogueÓ with black, a
theme of the series and also, as the psychological resonances of those colors
emerges, of his life. Then enters Ken, a young, aspiring artist that Rothko
will hire as his assistant, making it clear and unequivocal that
heÑRothkoÑis not the ÒkidÕsÓ teacher, rabbi, friend or anything
familiar, just his boss, and that Ken is only an employee. But of course and
inevitably, Rothko does become
all those things to Ken, just as Ken becomes RothkoÕs protŽgŽ, though neither
will articulate this. (Eddie Redmayne plays Ken with a deceptive simplicity, letting the young man appear
as callow as Rothko believes him to be, but gradually filling out his own
canvas as the character gets bolder.) ItÕs almost certain that Logan intends,
as conscious metaphor, that his characters emerge as developing
works-in-progress too, and the play is a brilliant articulation of both
artistic and inter-personal process.
The
direction by Michael Grandage is
at once elegant, unobtrusive and spare with the actors, while as visually provocative
as a Rothko canvas (one also must acknowledge the crucial contributions of set
& costume designer Christopher Oram, lighting designer Neil Austin and sound designer/composer Adam Cork).
Red
is an exhilarating evening of
language, ideas, passion and imagery. The imported engagement (which debuted at
LondonÕs Donmar Warehouse, despite Logan being an American playwright) is,
according to the brochure, limited to 15 weeks. But the afterburn may well last
a lifetimeÉ
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