We were about fifteen minutes into the performance of Red, John Logan’s award-winning play about Mark Rothko, when the theater’s fire alarm went off.  With the sangfroid and perfect timing you’d expect from a great actor, Alfred Molina turned to the audience and said “We never rehearsed this”.  This being London, we all filed out of the building good humoredly and politely, returning unharmed to our seats after a half hour or so for the re-started production. It’s an extraordinary, multi-layered play about many things, but mostly, I think, about Rothko’s fierce, unyielding, uncompromising commitment to his vision of art and life.

During the enforced intermission I got talking to a stranger who’d sat next to me in the theater.  A human rights worker from Mexico City, she was devoting her life to protecting the interests of the poor in places such as Guatemala and Honduras from unscrupulous corporations and corrupt governments who take their lands, livelihoods, and liberties without the slightest thought of the consequences. We continued the conversation over drinks after the wonderful show.  What impressed me as she talked – about injustice, precarious funding, and the petty rivalries of NGOs – was her total certainty about the trajectory of her professional life and the deep sense of mission driving her forward.  Hers was no job, no career, but a vocation propelled by a bright determination to fix something broken in dark places unknown and unimportant to almost everyone.  Vocations tend to cost something and hers certainly had in her personal life, but she’d paid the price happily because nothing else really mattered other than doing something, however small, for those unable to protect themselves.  Something small, but something still larger than herself.

Rothko would have understood.