"Red" Pilch. Review by Victoria Tayler

'What do you see?’ It is so hollow an opener in the mouth of Ollie Gillam’s sour, pontificating Mark Rothko, who stands inhospitably in the middle of the stage taking up (and indeed taking in) his own painting. It is so delicate a question in the eye of director Ezana Betru, who has deftly risen to the challenge of ‘Red’ with a rich production which, much like Rothko,, invites you to interpret every detail as meticulous and deliberate.

One stops short at claiming ‘divinely inspired,’ but Betru certainly experiments with divine themes. A surge of classical music and some heavenly white lighting, and one feels the heavy legacy of a renaissance painting tradition shouldered on one self-absorbed artist’s squared shoulders, even if they have never cared for Rothko’s behemoth red rectangles. It is but a small moment in a play embroidered with artistic decisions: it certainly never feels tired. As the blacklight switches on and our heavenly painters become luminescent, athletically smothering the canvas with paint in an almost dancer-like synchronisation, we can’t help but smile. There it is, the old ousted by the new, and with a sense of zany style about it to match.

John Logan’s ‘Red’ depicts a moment in the later career of Mark Rothko, infamous for his ‘five-year-old’ worthy paintings of red squares, and that of his assistant, Ken. Rothko, by this point well reknown if unbeloved, has been commissioned to paint a mural for the Four Seasons Hotel, “the biggest commission since the Sistine Chapel” and disdains it. Ken begins unimpressed but diffident, and eventually rises to challenge Rothko, criticising his vanity, his relentless self-seriousness, his dissonance in accepting the commission whilst lamenting the commercialisation of art and his inability to take seriously the new wave of artists symbolised by Andy Warhol.

As Ken grows more certain of himself, Rothko (beginning huge, abusive, all consuming) grows older and less convincing. The two come to a standstill over the issue of the young Warhol, who Rothko claims is trying to ‘kill him,’ that is, kill his art movement the way that his generation had replaced the Cubism wave a la Picasso. Ken cuts through Rothko’s claims that the new generation is uninspired, arguing that Warhol’s playfulness in the face of commercialisation is precisely what makes him authentic. Rothko, confronted by the fact that his lofty ideals conflict with the reality of his posh commission, cancels the murals (but keeps the money) and then fires Ken with the instruction that he go and make ‘something new.’

It’s a two hander played with precision. Ollie Gillam is imposing as the stiff and snarling Rothko, rolling his eyes with palpable hatred whilst mocking the world of art from which he profits, lingering gloomily (if a little ridiculously, as per Rothko) by his glaring red canvas. On the other hand, Ken (gender bent to great effect) is all tiptoe in the first half: tense, reserved, with the sense she may at any moment get up and walk out. As the play progresses, Ken seems to grow more steadfast, she stands firmer, challenging the now aged-feeling Rothko to a battle of worldviews. When they finally stand face to face, they feel like perfect opposites. Ken becomes more and more dimensional, taking over the Rothko-reserved space to monologue and turning the pointed finger back around. It is he, not she, who is now the artist ‘found wanting.’

Both actors reserve and then mete out their own moments of tragedy. Ken (Thalia Kermisch) provokes by pairing obviously traumatising information about her family’s murder with a lighthearted absurdism about her tendency to paint said murderers as ‘totally normal looking people.’ Rothko, by comparison, is perfectly depressing for no apparent reason in a manner that both makes you hate him and find him amusing. But when he collapses onto the floor and is found stiff and confused, Gillam’s staged agedness cannot help but prompt pity and conjure the tragedy with which Rothko is obsessed. No notes.

It would be nice to have at least one criticism just to avoid accusations of yes-man-syndrome. But it would be hard to. Indeed my only criticism, that the lighting on the actors seemed to be aggressively bright, later seemed a misguided complaint as Rothko, in a fit of rage and self-confrontation, shuts them off. It is then that it dawned: Rothko fears the blackness, his character insists upon the constant bright light. Now, this may be an overinterpretation, but in Betru’s confident hands, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were intentional. Not to mention the many shades of red through which the canvas cycles, facilitated by smooth and inventive changes in lighting, shows no deficit of expertise. Once again, no notes.