clipped from: www.nytimes.com

It’s not as if anyone is ever at a loss for words in John Logan’s „Red.“ So many of them are uttered, with such sharpshooting intensity and theatrical flourish, you wouldn’t think there would be much room for the unspoken. But there comes a moment in this concentrated study of artistic creation when the painter Mark Rothko (Alfred Molina) and his young assistant, Ken (Eddie Redmayne, right, with Mr. Molina), lay down their words, pick up their brushes and get physical. If the play has been acted at a fever pitch up to that point, it now rises to a level of heat that thermometers can’t measure.

What these men are doing here is a workaday task for an artist. They’re priming a canvas — that is, applying the undercoat on which Rothko will subsequently paint. But there’s nothing workaday about the fury with which these actors attack their job. They do it with a speed and intensity that suggests both rage and ecstasy, antagonistic competitiveness and familial collaboration. The primer, by the way, is red, and it gets all over these guys’ clothes and skin, and they’re soon looking like desperadoes at the end of a Sam Peckinpah movie. Are they making love or war? The mood music that Rothko has put on, a soaring aria from Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Aulide,” is equally appropriate to either activity. And all the talk that has preceded this scene — about the Dionysian spirit and the Oedipal clash of artistic generations — and the implicit mutual resentment and fascination that has been festering between the men find a pulse-quickening, visceral outlet. The director, Michael Grandage, and his actors have given us a physical — and triumphantly theatrical — correlative for intellectual tensions. Mr. Molina and Mr. Redmayne are breathing hard by the end of this scene. So is the audience, which probably feels as one that a post-coital cigarette wouldn’t be inappropriate.”

BEN BRANTLEY