Watching the world premiere of John Logan’s play Red last night at the Donmar Warehouse about the artist Mark Rothko, I was put in mind frequently of Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical about Georges Seurat, and not just because Philip Quast - who had played Seurat in that show’s London premiere at the National Theatre in 1990 - was sitting on the front row.
Of course the two shows are both about getting into the minds and motives of the artists concerned as much as their respective artistic processes. They also manage the rare feat of using one art form - the theatre - to actually demonstrate how another works from the inside out, as we literally see paint being transferred from brush to canvas. In the most galvanising scene last night, Alfred Molina (as Rothko) and Eddie Redmayne (as his assistant) prepare the colour base undercoat for a canvas by furiously painting it red.
But there are plenty of other resonances, not least when Rothko, in the final scene, sets his assistant off on his own creative journey - and urges him, “Make something new”. That has a direct parallel in the Sondheim, who in “Move On” has Seurat sing of his own ambitions, “I want to move on …/ I want to explore the light./ I want to know how to get through/ through to something new— / Something of my own!”
And while Rothko builds, as the title of the play suggests from the colour red - and avoids black, because he says, “black is the opposite of red — not on the spectrum, but in reality” - and ends the play staring at a red canvas once again, the most moving idea contained in Sunday in the Park with George is encapsulated at the end of that show by the joy of limitless possibility that was represented for Seurat by the absence of any colour at all: “White: a blank page or canvas. His favourite — so many possibilities.”
Of course, Yasmina Reza spun an entire play around an apparently blank canvas of white in Art, for a play that used one’s personal responses to art (as commodity as well as a reflection of taste) to observe the shifting power balances in a trio of friendships. (It was also coincidentally the play in which Alfred Molina made his 1998 Broadway debut). Theatre, in turn, regularly provides a blank canvas for different theatre makers to demonstrate the making of art through; just yesterday, Paul Taylor looked at different ways playwrights have attempted this in a feature in The Independent, and just how extensively, or not, they actually bring the work itself to the stage.
In 2007, the set for Antony Sher’s The Giant at Hampstead was dominated by a massive lump of Carrera marble that da Vinci and Michelangelo were competing over to receive a commission to carve a statue of David out of. That show was designed by William Dudley, who coincidentally also designed Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Line at the Arcola the week before last about the artists Edgar Degas and his protégée Suzanne Valadon, for which Dudley filled the space with large reproductions of their work. (It turned out to be the best part of a portentous play).
For Red, Michael Billington guesses in his review in today’s Guardian that “you feel designer Christopher Oram must have had a ball creating a set of replica canvasses.” The designer clearly matters nearly as much as the director in plays like this, though the expert way that Michael Grandage orchestrates his two actors in Red keeps them, and us, in a constant state of tension.
And next month the Old Vic revives John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, in which a two-sided Kandinsky features prominently. Of course, designers routinely create three-dimensional art with many sets they design; but art that revolves around art creates its own sense of playfulness and invention, and I can’t wait to see it again.
In “Putting it Together” from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, Seurat sings, “Art isn’t easy/ Every minor detail is a major decision”, and that’s true, no doubt, for every theatre designer seeking to represent it onstage, too.
But if art isn’t easy, real life is sometimes even harder. Rothko, of course, ended up committing suicide. But we can all go off the rails all too easily. And there was a very chastening story just yesterday that Wills Morgan - one of the original cast of Jerry Springer - The Opera when it opened at the National Theatre in 2003, playing the role of the nappy-wearing Montel in Act One, who then plays Jesus in the second act - “spent two months sleeping on a canal footpath after a series of crises that began with regularly confronting Christian protestors and ended with the death of his mother from cancer.”
He is quoted saying, “I guess my story shows how anyone, from any walk of life, can end up homeless - particularly during the recession which has forced so many people out of work. But the flip side is that there is help out there if you’re willing to ask for it.” And that help for him came via Brent Mind, a mental health charity in North London, and Genesis Housing Group that helped him to secure a one-bedroom flat.
Bob Butler, of the housing group which helps vulnerable people find accommodation, admits in the story that it was not every day that he would come across a homeless opera singer. “[He is] one of my more unusual clients,” he said. “When [Wills] came to me, he had been traumatised by Jerry Springer and then his mother died. His life fell apart. [But] he is definitely one of my success stories.”
