RED To 6 February 2010.

London.

RED
by John Logan

Donmar Warehouse 41 Earlham Street WC2H 9LX To 6 February 2010.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm.
Audio-described 23 Jan 2.30pm (+Touch Tour 1.30pm).
BSL Signed 1 Feb.
Captioned 25 Jan.
Runs 1hr 40min No interval.

TICKETS: 0844 871 7624.
www.donmarwarehouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 12 December.

Smart direction and skilled performances can’t give this canvas dramatic life.
Put two people in a room for 100 minutes and what do you get? Samuel Beckett made his grimmest play out of the situation in Endgame - though with the help of a couple of other, briefly-seen characters. But he made the action continuous. Like most such plays, John Logan’s look at abstract US painter Mark Rothko in grumbling late-career moves through a number of shortish snapshot scenes set in 1958 and 1959.

Alongside Alfred Molina’s hulkingly bear-like Rothko, prominently bald and bespectacled, is Eddie Redmayne’s young Ken. Both play extremely well, but neither can give life to this inert piece for more than a few seconds at a time. And director Michael Grandage seems caught by a script that, as surely as turning up a radio’s volume will increase any interference, can only be played with force by revealing an essential hollowness.

Perhaps this lies in a painter whose opinion of his own importance seems laughable when it boils down to huge red and black canvasses (only a stroke or two away from the kind of play where we finally see the ‘great painter’ has brought forth a blank canvas). Rothko’s self-importance gives him the unpredictability of a bully. Young Ken, an acolyte happy to fetch coffee and mix colours for the great man, is an easy victim, especially as he doesn’t realise a victim is what he is.

At one point Rothko roars approval when Ken stands up for himself; at another he shouts him down for inadvertently answering Rothko’s outloud rhetorical question. Though Rothko’s response at this point at least carries a psychological reality too rare in Logan’s carefully-plotted dialogue.

Mainly, this two-hander swings predictably between lighter and tenser moments, like an aesthetically ambitious Driving Miss Daisy, but one that has nowhere to ride. Even Rothko’s decision over a lucrative commission from a fashionable restaurant fizzles out.

Tellingly the most interesting moments tend to come with the selection of music to play on Rothko’s gramophone, and a rare moment of surging action when they prepare a new canvas: what emerges, all too tellingly, is a blank undercoat.

Mark Rothko: Alfred Molina.
Ken: Eddie Redmayne.

Director: Michael Grandage.
Designer: Christopher Oram.
Lighting: Neil Austin. Sound/Composer: Adam Cork.

2009-12-28 23:32:43