Red

Artists and converted warehouses seem made for each other: and so it proves in John Logan's chin-stroking two-hander about Mark Rothko, a new play which only the Donmar could exhibit so successfully. The 250-seat auditorium looks like an autopsy victim: its wings are sliced open to re-create Rothko's New York studio circa 1958-9, a slab-like chamber splattered with so many arterial paint-blobs that you'd think it was Jack the Dripper's, were it not for the geometrical red and black canvases at the back. But Jackson Pollock (dead and worshipped) and Andy Warhol (with his irreverent new art of consumerism) are purely offstage demons here: Rothko's inner conflicts are staged through the working relationship of the middle-aged artist (struggling with an u(add umlaut)ber-lucrative contract to paint murals for the 'Four Seasons' restaurant) and his idealistic young dogsbody, Ken.

Plays about artists often fail because the work says everything that someone else's dialogue can't. And the first 50 minutes, in which Rothko holds forth about 'pulsation' , Apollonian and Dionysiac balance, and his own will to greatness, suffer from too little action and too much Nietzsche-picking. But Michael Grandage's productions, whilst always lit and designed with great artistry, are primarily canvases for the actors, and two superb performances stop this being arty in all the wrong ways.

Shaven-headed and caterpillar-browed, Alfred Molina inhabits the titanically self-absorbed Rothko with such single-minded charisma that you almost buy his theories: it's a relief when his seriousness makes him deadpan funny. And Eddie Redmayne brings poignant tenacity to the bullied young aspiring painter Ken, who turns up for his first day as bucket boy in a Sunday suit which is two inches too short. Logan's play gains force after a wordless and passionate scene in which Rothko and his assistant slather a canvas in red paint: proof that applying a base coat can be just as dramatic as sex and violence if it means all that and more to the painter. The obscure conflicts finally get personal when Ken finds a voice and accuses his employer of selling out to the highest bidder: in a scene that prefigures the artist's eventual suicide, Molina finally shows you the darkness that Rothko fears when he predicts that one day 'the black will swallow the red.' Ulimately, this is theatre's answer to 100 minutes spent studying a Rothko: it's static, but look hard and you'll see powerful vibrations.