Plays about painters are fraught with difficulty. Either the hero preaches about art without practising it, or the Bohemian lifestyle supersedes the work. But John Logan's play about Mark Rothko overcomes these obstacles with finesse: partly because, for Rothko, ideas were inseparable from art, and partly because of the tensions within the paintings themselves which Rothko once described as "dramas".
At first, Logan seems in danger of lapsing into a lecture on aesthetics. The setting is Rothko's New York studio in 1958-9 when he was engaged on a set of murals for the ritzy Four Seasons restaurant. We see the rabbinical Rothko dispensing dictums to his young assistant, Ken; we learn how paintings need to pulsate and be seen in a protected space. But the drama quickens into life as Ken boldly challenges Rothko's theories of colour, advocates pop art, and questions his employer's integrity in accepting a commission from a temple of consumption.
But Logan's success lies in reminding us that painting is a job of work. Rothko, unlike the piratical Jackson Pollock, keeps nine-to-five banker's hours. We also see paint being mixed, nails hammered into frames, and canvasses raised and lowered on pulleys.
Best of all is a sequence when Rothko and his helpmate prime a blank canvas by creating a base, plum-coloured layer. As the two men enthusiastically splash on the paint, to the sound of a Gluck aria on the studio phonograph, we get to share the physical exhilaration of initiating a piece of art.
That moment compensates for Logan's occasional overemphasis on Rothko's vision of art as a suffering-laden vocation, and for the hero's apparent indifference to the world beyond the studio: he shows no interest in Ken as a person, and even regards the revelation that his parents were murdered as a creative stimulus. But what emerges is something rare in modern drama: a totally convincing portrait of the artist as a working visionary.
Whatever Rothko's suicidal fate, here ingeniously intimated, you feel designer Christopher Oram must have had a ball creating a set of replica canvasses. And Michael Grandage's beautiful production is, as always, actor-driven. Alfred Molina, with his large frame and beetling eyebrows, has exactly the fierce intensity of an artist whose paintings were a dynamic battle between Apollo and Dionysus, and who once said that he saw art as a means of direct access to the "wild terror and suffering" at the heart of human existence. And Eddie Redmayne as Ken moves with total ease from nervous pupil to combative antagonist. It's a measure of the play's success that it makes you want to rush out and renew acquaintance with Rothko's work.