OF A WORK OF ART.

ITS INGREDIENTS. HOW TO MAKE IT. THE FORMULA.

1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death –intimations of mortality… Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.

2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.

3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.

4. Irony. This is a modern ingredient – the self-efacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.

5. Wit and play…for the human element.

6. The ephemeral and chance…for the human element.

7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that allows these elements and the picture results from the proportions of these elements.

Hello and welcome to our co-production with Prime Cut of John Logan’s Red Red is a remarkable play based on fictionalised incidents from the life of the mid-twentieth century, Russian born, American artist Mark Rothko. Rothko was a painter whose canvases consisted of large, hypnotic and poignant fields of colour. Their vastness confronts us, the play of light and space reminds me of looking at a lake with a calm surface concealing depths. But it’s like the lake is standing in front of you or you are flying over it backwards. After a while you realise that the surface is not so calm, the tranquillity they promise is hard won, the vertigo is efective. You don’t so much look into them as, in a Nietzschian (a favourite philosopher of Rothko’s) way, they look back into you. In some of these extraordinary paintings it is as if you have been granted the ability to see into the centre of an atom as it splits.

We are delighted to be presenting this with Prime Cut. They have been at the forefront of theatre in these islands for the past decade and more. Their choices are always unique and inspired by the politics and philosophies of the city they come from. They have forged a clear and strong identity by producing a healthy mix of international plays with new

Along with the award winning and hugely talented designer Ciaran Bagnall these wonderful artists have found inspiration in the work of Rothko and I am really looking forward to how they make John Logan’s Tony award winning play dance across the Lyric stage.

Jimmy Fay Executive Producer

DIRECTOR’S NOTE ABOUT THE ARTIST

Welcome to Prime Cut and the Lyric Theatre’s co-production of Red by John Logan. I feel like a very lucky woman to be directing this play about the wonderful Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. I have often wondered why theatre and visual arts don’t cross over very often – it seems to me that there is a natural afnity between the artforms – theatre at its best is a series of compositions underlined by emotional truth so the opportunity to direct a play about an artist who was so inspired by Greek theatre is awesome, in the real sense of that word. On several occasions Rothko spoke of the importance of tragedy and tragic themes as stimuli for the creation of profound beauty: he considered tragedy a theme worthy of art; he cited Greek Theatre and the way it dealt with the depth of human emotions and universal truths. Although the colours, composition, and levels of intensity change, heroic themes permeate his painting, so too do they permeate this play. Whilst Rothko’s tragic suicide in 1970 is not directly dealt with in Red it nevertheless permeates Red

John Logan was inspired to write Red after seeing the Seagram collection in the Tate – If you are lucky enough to have experienced a visit to that commanding and austere room you will understand the power of those paintings. When I visited last summer I found them overwhelming – I frankly couldn’t wait to leave that room – in the midst of a recent bereavement I found myself in a panic. If there is a single thing I like about this play is that it leads us into a way of seeing Rothko’s work – there is something wonderfully democratic about that – liberating. In the process of working on this play I think I have learned how to ‘see’ better – so next time I go to the Tate I will stay a while – I will go past my panic and I will sit and let the paintings work.

I hope you enjoy Red as much as we have enjoyed making it.

Emma Jordan Artistic Director Prime Cut Productions

Fleeing anti-semitic oppression in his native Russia, the ten year old Mark Rothko travelled across Europe and the Atlantic to the promise of the New World. Once there he spent three weeks crossing the country to Portland, Oregon, wearing a sign around his neck declaring he spoke no English. Fast forward seven years and he had won a scholarship to Yale University. But this bastion of WASP privilege, where numbers of Jewish students were limited by a strict quota, ofered Rothko no sense of belonging. He would leave without graduating, joining an avant-garde community of immigrant artists in New York which watched as its Old World was torn apart by the Second World War. The ravages of that war and the horror of the Atom Bomb meant that the world would never be as it had been before; nor would art. Bodies could no longer be complete – the war had distorted, destroyed them, ripped them apart. So Rothko looked for a whole new language for his paintings. Gone were the figures of representational art; moving centre stage were the fundamental elements of form and colour. Enigmatic life-size canvases with luminous, soft-edged pulsating doorways, ways in or out, from here or now or there or then, calling and beckoning. Rothko had found a sublime universal language for the tragedy of the human condition, and the emotion of all our lives and journeys and deaths.