By Alan
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsSdhhv6ldg
Available until: 7pm on Wednesday 2nd
December
I like plays about real people a lot.
I also like plays about fictional people because it’s all about the
playwright’s imagination but there is something special about seeing a play
about a real person and then finding out about them. Often they’re not very
much like the real person or you can’t be sure what if they’re like the real
person or not. But it’s interesting just discovering a new person who is kind
of great in some way.
Red by John Logan is about the painter Mark
Rothko and his commission to do a series of paintings for the Four Seasons
restaurant. I like art but I hadn’t heard of him. So I read about him and he
had a really interesting life. He was Jewish and was born in what was then part
of the Russian Empire and is now Latvia. He moved to America, he did very well
at school but he dropped out of college and didn’t go back till they awarded
him an honorary degree which I thought was funny. He was very political and an
anarchist. He became interested in art when he saw other artists at work. He
had a group of painter friends and a group of anarchic friends. He started
writing a book which was a comparison between children’s art and the best
painters’ art but he didn’t finish it.
