Watching this was a slightly odd experience for me. Rothko's works often provoke a response in me that nothing else comes close to; seeing his Seagram pieces in the Tate Modern last year, for example - their composition is central to "Red" - was an almost spiritual experience (a word I don't use lightly). It's not overstating it to say that he's an iconic artist for me. And having browsed or read any number of monographs about him, I've picked up far more about his approach to art and about his life than I normally do about artists I like (generally, I prefer to try to let the art itself speak to me, without the distracting context of the artist themselves, however artificial that idea may be), and that background knowledge gave "Red" a faintly uncanny feeling, with all of the key ideas, figures, events that it presents already being intensely familiar, and not only that, but all wrapped up with my own feelings, thoughts and associations around Rothko's art.
At first, I found it a bit talky and insular - a bit too self-focused - but the play had largely won me over by the end; I realised that my heart was beating much faster than normal as it came towards its end. It's far from a great play - its construction as something similar to a Socratic dialogue between the artist and his assistant (although it moves beyond that in the closing stages) is limiting, particularly when the ambition of the play is to say something about artistic truth, and the presentation of Rothko himself felt somewhat reductionistic (even as the play itself has Rothko rail against the tendency to reduce the lives of those he considers his peers in just that way). But it does succeed in at least grappling with some of the key concerns that animated Rothko's own work and life, and dramatising them reasonably effectively - if a bit programmatically, principally through the conversations / monologues about 'red' and 'black'.
And it acquires a bit of an emotional charge at the end - the final scene, opening with the assistant discovering the painter lying flat on his back in his studio, red paint streaks on his wrists, is haunted not only by the audience's autobiographical knowledge that that was how Rothko himself was found, dead by suicide, but also by a few lines of dialogue earlier in the play where the painter speaks of 'when', rather than 'if', he will commit suicide, overwhelmed (the play would have it) like his contemporary Jackson Pollock, by a Nietzschean sense of tragedy. Indeed, that last scene, with Rothko setting his assistant free and adjuring him to go out and create new art himself, in the brave new world of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol et al, even though it means figuratively killing those (like Rothko) of the generation before, can be read as a directive from beyond the grave from Rothko himself - and, perhaps, a final affirmatory 'what do you see?' 'red' answer to the 'black' fear of being weighed and found wanting as one looks at once to the past and to the future.
(w/ Cass, Andreas, David, Steph N, Alice)
At first, I found it a bit talky and insular - a bit too self-focused - but the play had largely won me over by the end; I realised that my heart was beating much faster than normal as it came towards its end. It's far from a great play - its construction as something similar to a Socratic dialogue between the artist and his assistant (although it moves beyond that in the closing stages) is limiting, particularly when the ambition of the play is to say something about artistic truth, and the presentation of Rothko himself felt somewhat reductionistic (even as the play itself has Rothko rail against the tendency to reduce the lives of those he considers his peers in just that way). But it does succeed in at least grappling with some of the key concerns that animated Rothko's own work and life, and dramatising them reasonably effectively - if a bit programmatically, principally through the conversations / monologues about 'red' and 'black'.
And it acquires a bit of an emotional charge at the end - the final scene, opening with the assistant discovering the painter lying flat on his back in his studio, red paint streaks on his wrists, is haunted not only by the audience's autobiographical knowledge that that was how Rothko himself was found, dead by suicide, but also by a few lines of dialogue earlier in the play where the painter speaks of 'when', rather than 'if', he will commit suicide, overwhelmed (the play would have it) like his contemporary Jackson Pollock, by a Nietzschean sense of tragedy. Indeed, that last scene, with Rothko setting his assistant free and adjuring him to go out and create new art himself, in the brave new world of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol et al, even though it means figuratively killing those (like Rothko) of the generation before, can be read as a directive from beyond the grave from Rothko himself - and, perhaps, a final affirmatory 'what do you see?' 'red' answer to the 'black' fear of being weighed and found wanting as one looks at once to the past and to the future.
(w/ Cass, Andreas, David, Steph N, Alice)
