‘It was only meant to be a small experimental project,” says Łukasz Twarkowski with a knowing smile. The 42-year-old Polish-born director is discussing his show Rohtko, inspired by a real-life art forgery scandal. In 2009, it was revealed that the prestigious New York gallery Knoedler & Co had paid more than $20m for paintings by Mark Rothko and other abstract expressionists, which transpired to be fake. The gallery folded, the art world quaked, and the paint trail led back to a Chinese maths teacher living in Queens.
The case has already been the subject of Netflix documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art. In Twarkowski’s hands, it becomes a vehicle to interrogate preconceptions about originality and authenticity. These he holds up to the light, finding them suspect if not counterfeit. True to his intentions, Rohtko (the title is deliberately misspelt) is experimental. But at just under four hours in length, with a spectacular set by Fabien Lédé and a palette as stylish and sumptuous as any Michael Mann or Wong Kar-Wai film, “small” it is not.
“That wasn’t a decision so much as an accumulation,” explains Twarkowski when we meet in Amsterdam during the show’s run at the Holland festival. “At some point, you put all the interesting scenes together and you’re terrified because you didn’t expect it to be so long.” Then again, his productions – such as The Employees, set on board a cube-like spacecraft, and Respublika, an immersive six-hour rave complete with functioning bars, dancefloors and even a sauna – tend to be events rather than plays. “Theatre doesn’t have to be boring,” he says, proving himself a master of understatement as well as spectacle.
A densely layered intellectual thriller scripted by Anka Herbut and scored by invigorating techno beats, Rohtko hops between past, present and future. The action is restricted mainly to a Chinese restaurant decked out in sizzling reds and greens, and housed on stage within a transparent box the size of a shipping container.
What unfolds in that smoky establishment is relayed to the audience on video screens via a team of camera operators whom we can see moving around inside the murk like divers, their live feed coming to us as if from the ocean bed. An actor might exit the restaurant and address us directly – speaking, as well as thinking, outside the box. Eventually, the restaurant splits in half, as does the narrative timeline, with Rothko and his wife in the 1950s sharing the stage with two modern-day actors auditioning to star in their story. Then things get really trippy …
Lédé gives me a tour of the set, which is cracked open on stage like a fortune cookie after the previous night’s performance. We peek inside the restaurant’s kitchen. It is here that the show’s Chinese cook bemoans the art world’s deference to “the cult of the original – it’s as if they didn’t know that nothing comes out of nowhere”. Another character advises: “Start copying what you love. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.”
Lédé, a painter who was coaxed into theatre by Twarkowski, recalls how Rohtko began. “We knew this would be about the art market, the life of Rothko, fakes and originals. I created an abstract playground that we could build a story inside before we had a script.” One of his touches was to foreground the crew members who break apart and reassemble the set. “Rather than pretending it’s magic, we make the crew very visible in white costumes, like art handlers.”
Several scenery-shifters appear on stage at that moment in a way that suggests Lédé has summoned them for my benefit. That’s the Rohtko effect: audiences may not be able to step up and inspect the set, as they could during The Employees, or join actors on the dancefloor as in Respublika, but the show’s aesthetic and intellectual spell makes it tricky to discern where the drama ends and life begins.
An example: despite the theatre’s warning that photography is prohibited, the woman seated beside me during the performance kept sneakily snapping away. In a show about the integrity of imitation, she was making her own copies. I ask Twarkowski whether she was a plant. “No,” he laughs. “And if you really love something and want to keep it with you, why not?”
Rohtko challenges the sanctity of originality on every level, from its use of a Chinese rendition of one of pop’s most famous cover versions (Prince’s Nothing Compares 2U, immortalised by Sinéad O’Connor) to the unstable relationship between physical action and its video reproduction. “There is a strange tension between what is happening live and what you see on the screen,” Twarkowski agrees. “Framing the action with cameras builds a false promise of an unfinished, unseen world beyond the frame. But when you look away from the screen, you can see very clearly where the stage ends.”
The show makes notions about artistic purity begin to feel materialistic, even fascistic. “Of course,” he says, “it’s why I think Asian culture is better prepared for a world of NFTs and the whole digital era. From our Judeo-Christian tradition, we are born with the feeling of a beginning and an end. We don’t have the eternal loop which is central to Asian culture. When you have a never-ending process, you cannot have anything that is original because that would prove there is a beginning.”
All this is spoken breathlessly, with boyish excitement, and with nothing to suggest that Twarkowski has been mulling over these ideas since long before the show premiered in 2022 at Dailes theatre in Riga, Latvia. Ever since he read the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in fact, and realised that the two Chinese signs for “original” translate as “authentic trace”.
The only unambiguous moment in Rohtko is its curtain call, when the stage is dominated by a profane anti-Russia slogan set against the Ukrainian flag. It’s a “small gesture”, says Twarkowski, but one that will remain until the war is over. With Rohtko, Twarkowski tells us: go fake yourself. His message to Russia is almost the same.
