Red, Wyndham's Theatre, London, review: Alfred Molina plays Mark Rothko in a phenomenal production of a flawed play

We’re used to plays in which visual art gets talked about a lot – and there’s certainly no dearth of Grand Statements about the subject in this John Logan two-hander about the tormented genius of the Abstract Expressionist painter, Mark Rothko.

But Michael Grandage’s superlative staging of the piece is uncommon in the way it also brings home the overwhelming physical presence of great pictures and the day-to-day labour that goes into their making.

He directed the world premiere in 2009 at the Donmar after which the show went straight to Broadway where it picked up six Tony Awards. It’s a pleasure to see his production back in the West End at long last, with Alfred Molina digging ever deeper in his riveting portrayal of Rothko and Alfred Enoch putting his persuasive stamp on the role originally played by Eddie Redmayne.

The piece is set in the painter’s New York studio in 1958 and 1959, when he was working on a set of paintings for the ritzy Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram building on Fifth Avenue. What this most spiritually contemplative of artists thought he was up to accepting such a commission eventually becomes one of the bones of contention between him and Ken, his new young assistant whom Logan has invented.

The unfinished pictures – slabs of red and black in pulsating interplay – are superbly recreated in Christopher Oram’s wonderful design.

“Nature doesn’t work for me,” Rothko says at one point. “The light’s no good.” The spell he wanted to cast was theatrical in its controlled effects.

Neil Austin, the excellent lighting designer, makes the pictures glow and throb and fade and there’s a shocking moment when Ken switches on the overhead fluorescent lights – an action that rudely flattens the canvases, banishing the magic.

As he teaches his assistant (and us) how to look at his paintings, there’s too much of the high-end art appreciation course in Rothko’s oracular pronouncements about the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus in his work and the layered luminescence in the rectangles that seem to float and shimmer in space.

But Molina – shaven-headed and beetle-browed – brilliantly captures the contrast between the artist’s bullying self-absorption in his dealings with Ken and his fearful, fatherly protectiveness towards his pictures which he treats like vulnerable people. You can almost hear the solicitous intensity of his gaze as he sits with his back to us, looking at one, in the minutes before the play proper begins.

After two years of Rothko’s indifference to him as a person, Ken finds the courage to stand up to his mentor, challenging his theories of colour, his contempt for Pop art, and his controversial acceptance of the Four Seasons commission. Enoch is totally convincing in the character’s transition from nervous, eager acolyte to blistering Oedipal antagonist.

But there’s one thing he cannot bring to believable life. The actor pours heart and soul into Ken’s revelation that he found his parents knifed to death by burglars when he was seven. It still sounds like a phoney set piece concocted for the convenience of the play’s red-and-black theme.

“There is only one thing I fear in life my friend... One day the black will swallow the red,” declares Rothko, finding perhaps too pat and prophetic a formulation for the encroachment of suicidal depression.

“Silence is so accurate,” is one of the artist’s real-life aphorisms appropriated by the play. You may think of that during the wordless, powerfully eloquent sequences where we watch frames being hammered into place, colours mixed, and paintings manhandled on and off Rothko’s characteristic pulley system. An aria by Gluck swells on the studio record-player in the extraordinary sequence where artist and assistant launch themselves at a blank canvas and frenziedly prime it all over – a first assault that leaves them both looking like blood-spattered warriors.

Flawed play; phenomenal production.

Until 28 July (mgcwestend.co.uk)