I always thought Alfred Molina was American until I heard him being interviewed on the radio about his new play, Red. Dan in the office thought he was Spanish but I can report that he is in fact English, born and bred.
I blame Spiderman. When people don't know who he is, I always say Dr Octavius because that is the character I most associate him with which I'm sure would make him cringe.
But any superhuman traits were quickly forgotten when metaphorical curtain went up on the Donmar's small but perfectly formed stage.
Red, a new play by John Logan, is a two-hander about artist Mark Rothko and his fictitious young studio assistant, Ken, played by the deep-voiced Eddie Redmayne (Angel Clare in the recent TV adaptation of Tess of the D'ubervilles). The action all takes place in the studio as Rothko is working on the lucrative Seagram commission for its luxury New York restaurant.
It is a play of conflicts, of different styles of art, interpretation and temperament. Rothko represents the established surrealist school and a deeply considered approach to art against Ken who's interested in the emerging pop artists such as Warhol and an approach that is more about free will, excess and irony.
Rothko is at first a bully, flexing his interlectual and artistic muscle over Ken but as time passes has his ideas and art challenged and hypocrisy exposed:
"No one is good enough to look at your art!"
The studio setting makes for fascinating back drop as the two work on the series of paintings. Building the frames, stretching canvases, mixing paint, even painting, in a mesmerising frenzy, the base coat on one of the huge canvasses, finishing breathless and so splattered in red paint as to look like they'd walked through a massacre. After which effort Rothko on observing their work comments:
"It will do."
Both actors put in absorbing performances (there is one particular scene where Redmayne is move to an almost tearful rage that takes your breath away) and there is so much in the dialogue to think about I'm almost desperate to see it again or at the very least get hold of a copy so as to better take it in.
It was fascinating piece of theatre and brilliant start to the year. Go and see it if you can.
Expert reviews follow which are perfect examples of why I never read others' views before I see plays (or films). Both are by respected and knowledgeable critics one of whom loved it and one of whom hated it. The Tory-graph's Charles Spencers comments about it being a 'snob-hit among the chattering classes' actually makes me feel quite elevated as I still struggle to think of myself as being anything other than plain working class owing to my upbringing but the photocopier will have to suffice as a surface over which to discuss the play as I can't afford to eat in 'swanky restuarants':
Guardian Plays about painters are fraught with difficulty. Either the hero preaches about art without practising it, or the Bohemian lifestyle supersedes the work. But John Logan's play about Mark Rothko overcomes these obstacles with finesse: partly because, for Rothko, ideas were inseparable from art, and partly because of the tensions within the paintings themselves which Rothko once described as "dramas".
Telegraph Red will almost certainly become a snob hit among the chattering classes, who will then go on to patronise the kind of swanky restaurant Rothko despised and discuss the play over the starters.
But it strikes me as a second-rate piece that diminishes a great artist while bumming a ride on a talent far greater than the playwright possesses himself.