On the London Stage - A Pained Artist Inveighs Against Nature - NYTimes.com LONDON - The art of making art is a topic beloved by those creators - artists, even - who labor in the world of the theater, not least Stephen Sondheim, who used that very lyric in his Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, "Sunday In the Park With George," about the painter Georges Seurat. But I don't think I've ever before seen a play that puts the actual artistic process center stage with as much energy and command as John Logan's "Red," which has arrived at the Donmar in a thrilling production that brings a good year in London for new plays to an electrifying close. Mr. Logan, though American, popped up now and again on the London playwriting scene some 20 years ago, since which time he has hit Hollywood pay dirt as author of the screenplays for "Gladiator," "The Aviator," and Mr. Sondheim's own "Sweeney Todd," to name but a few. "Red," then, marks a return to the one-time Chicagoan's stage roots even as it marks a departure for the Donmar, whose intimate yet high-walled space has not previously been so cunningly deployed. I suppose there has always been something of the chic gallery feel about the Donmar's exposed-brick back wall, which has been reconfigured by the brilliant designer Christopher Oram to provide a home to the paintings of Mark Rothko, the Russian-born American abstract expressionist glimpsed at here a decade or so before he took his own life in 1970. And as the 100-minute play (no intermission) unfolds, the various possibilities of Mr. Oram's environment expand in meaning. The setting is at once a deliberately sealed-off New York studio, its airlessness of a piece with an aesthetic revolutionary who is heard inveighing against nature, and, after a time, a kind of mausoleum, as well: the source of Rothko's inspiration and simultaneously the locus of his gathering despair. One can easily imagine more turgid versions of this two-hander that will surely be done in time; it's not easy to carry lightly a text prone to discussion of "radiating . . . effulgence" and the "multifarious complexities and nuances of the psyche." But as directed with surpassing empathy and style by Michael Grandage in one of the benchmark achievements of his prolific career to date, a play that could have drowned in its own artist-speak and psychologizing remains bruisingly alert throughout. Do you have to respond to Rothko's shimmering grids of color, various versions of which are pulled into and from view throughout the show, to relate to the drama on display? It can't hurt. But I equally suspect that playgoers with little prior awareness of this artist's output will react to the baleful, sometimes belligerent struggle of Alfred Molina, as Rothko, summing up the trajectory of his doomed life in terms of the painter's palette. "One day," he muses, with prophetic accuracy, "the black will swallow the red." When we first encounter the play's physically rangy Rothko he is seated, his back to the audience as they walk in, engaged in an internal debate with his own expression as a new assistant arrives. This newcomer to what is later described as a "hermetically sealed submarine" is a young artist, Ken (Eddie Redmayne), who, we soon discover in the play's sole glaring contrivance, has his own acquaintanceship with the color red in a traumatic back story that is introduced into events to give equal weight to the two men's psychic burdens. In fact, what is more interesting about "Red" is its unusual lack of reliance for the most part on the sorts of stagy reminiscences in which such bioplays often traffic. Actually, I'm not convinced this is the kind of biographical drama (think "Tru" or the Emily Dickinson-themed "The Belle of Amherst") long championed by the theater. For one thing, almost as much time in "Red" is devoted to showing us the artist in action as in self-conscious self-reflection, a sequence of the two men spattering themselves with paint as they furiously prime a canvas as viscerally exciting as the adrenalin rush you get from many an action film.