Morecambe
Duchess
Red
Donmar
Peter Kay: ‘I’ve never met a person who didn’t at the very least love Eric Morecambe.’ Hello? Peter? Over here. I remember Eric and Ernie during the 1970s and they were as entertaining as a power cut. Perfunctory, passionless mother-in-law jokes. Semi-funny puns pouring out like weak tea. Nursery-rhyme repetition everywhere. The catchphrases. The trick with the paper bag. Eric slapping Ernie’s cheeks. Endless jibes about Ernie’s hairy legs and his playwriting ambitions, even though both gags were non sequiturs: we couldn’t see Ernie’s legs and we knew for sure he wasn’t a playwright because he was too busy being the country’s richest unfunny stand-up. Their bland, innocuous comedy of reassurance didn’t travel well. America sent them packing. Their films bombed. The oft-quoted stat that 28 million of us watched their 1977 Christmas Special conceals the fact that the other 28 millon of us had better things to do.
So the Eric Morecambe tribute show arrives in the West End laden with assurances of its brilliance. I found it unexpectedly captivating. Bob Golding’s performance fizzes with charisma and bonhomie. The impersonation is absolutely uncanny. Look up there. Eric’s back. He isn’t dead. He’s in the room with all his tricks and shuffles, his winks and twinkles. All the jokes have returned from the graveyard as well. An ambulance goes past, siren blaring. ‘He won’t sell much ice cream going at that speed.’ Fairly amusing. Sort of. Oh, all right, then, funny.
To the Donmar Warehouse for a bio-drama featuring the conceptual painter Mark Rothko. Heard of him? Here’s a clue. Whoops, I’ve dropped another gallon of ketchup. That Mark Rothko. This play is about painting, or rather about the remnant of painting we call ‘modern art’. Before photograpy destroyed draughtsmanship, artists were labourers, odd-jobbers, innovators, scientists in the best sense, philosophers with dirty hands using the materials of the universe to enhance our understanding of it. Until the second half of the 19th century, painting was a vague and happy alliance between technique and meaning. No one cared at what point a piece of representative art rose from the literal to the metaphysical. But once craftsmanship became obsolete this started to matter a lot. It became paramount. Divine inspiration was everything suddenly, because there was nothing else. Every artist had to pose as a genius or face being dismissed as a water-colourist, a weekend doodler, an easel weasel painting pretty sunsets. Artists declared war on craftsmanship. Sadly they won. (Writers tried it, too, but after Finnegans Wake, the worst book ever published, they hastily and blushingly signed an armistice.) Crucial to the artist’s new status was his strategic decision to shift the burden of elucidation from himself to the viewer. ‘Don’t ask me what it means. I commune with the godhead, earth-dweller, you explain it to me.’
These two renunciations — of technique and of meaning — created art in its current phase of inscrutable frivolity. And though Rothko’s work is nothing more than a collection of big crimson stains, I found this play about him superbly rewarding. I loved its narrowness. It focuses entirely on Rothko’s artistic temperament. There’s a storyline but it’s daringly flimsy.
Rothko hires a new assistant, Ken, and bullies him remorselessly as they toil away on a commission for a swanky restaurant that Rothko despises. We hear nothing of Rothko’s emotional life or family background. The script doesn’t even ask us to like him. He’s drawn as a monster, a mountain of rage, envy, vanity, megalomania, pettiness and pretention. The play merely wants us to understand him. And this it achieves magnificently.
Writer John Logan has given Rothko a powerful intellect and a savage, Swiftian tongue. Here he is satirising the wealthy philistines who drool over his work. ‘My neighbour’s got a Rothko, the social-climbing bitch, in fact, she’s got two so I need three. Can you do something that works with the sofa?’ Alfred Molina is on top form as the aesthetic powerhouse and Eddie Redmayne brings that extraordinary quality of his — a sort of translucent vibrancy — to Ken. Driven to distraction by Rothko’s verbal lashings, Ken finally retaliates and accuses him of regarding his clients as unworthy owners of his work. No human being alive deserves to look at his pictures. Rothko doesn’t disagree. ‘I’m fired, aren’t I?’ mutters Ken. ‘Fired?’ smiles Rothko. ‘This is the first day you existed.’ What a great piece of theatre.
It’s rare to leave a show with an entire region of your imaginative life extended. Before last Saturday I assumed that conceptual artists falsely claimed oracular rank in order to shore up their value in the market place. But Rothko wasn’t dissembling. He thought he was a genius. The fact that he was mistaken doesn’t alter the sincerity of his belief.
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