Red review: Alfred Molina brilliantly captures energy and grandeur of Mark Rothko

Plays about artists often struggle to convey the bloodshot drama of creation. They also risk being bombastic — packed with lofty discussions of aesthetics. There are certainly moments when John Logan ’s portrait of Mark Rothko feels like a sermon or a lecture. But it captures the grandeur of this famously imperious painter’s vision.

Crucial to this is Alfred Molina, returning to the role he played when Logan’s two-hander premiered in London in 2009. Roaring with rage and pacing like a condemned prisoner, he has both the feverish energy and the gravitas to be wholly plausible as this brilliant and titanically self-absorbed figure.

It’s New York in the late Fifties, and Rothko is under commission to create a group of murals for a smart new restaurant. While there’s big money involved, the project threatens his notion of painting as an almost religious act. Toiling in a studio that looks like a slaughterhouse — an extravagantly spattered set by Christopher Oram, dominated by the artist’s vast canvases — Rothko is combative yet also plagued by doubt, not least about his work’s durability.

His fictional assistant Ken at first seems meekly content to mix paints and run errands. But when growing confidence and exasperation prompt an attack on Rothko’s self-delusion, he becomes a crusader for a generation too used to being patronised, and Alfred Enoch brings wit and balletic physicality to a part that originally belonged to Eddie Redmayne.

Michael Grandage’s precisely choreographed production is sensitive to the play's tensions and rhythms, and there’s a glorious scene in which the master and his apprentice prime a bare canvas — an exhilarating ritual that bears out Rothko's idea of art as something intimate and miraculous.

Until July 28