Chatter, chatter, chatter. The audience at the Wyndham’s plays its part to perfection as the curtain rises on Michael Grandage’s revival of Red – John Logan’s transfixing portrait of the artist Mark Rothko in the late Fifties.

One of the heavyweights of American abstract expressionism sits in a low chair, his back to us, contemplating a mighty canvas. He’s in ordinary crumpled blue clothes; the work – something like Red on Maroon (1959) – is an astonishment of colour, a daubed rough rectangular frame of red that sits in visceral argument with its contrasting underlay. Yet the show hasn’t technically started yet, so people browse programmes, gawp at phones, gaily natter.

Point made before a word is uttered on stage. Rothko saw red when he visited the lavish Four Seasons restaurant in the newly constructed Seagram Building in midtown Manhattan. He had spent ages toiling on a series of murals that were to hang among the diners – giving them an awesome foretaste of mortality, even of biblical reckoning. But he somehow hadn’t foreseen the distracted clatter of guzzling consumers.

Arriving at his studio like an angry bull – according to his studio assistant at the time – he ranted: “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine”, a line near-recycled here.

Fictionalised assistant Ken provides an audience for Rothko's polemics

Rothko returned his commission, rescued his murals. Yet that retreat signalled a cultural turning-point – so Logan insinuates in his immaculately conceived two-hander. Rothko and co elbowed aside their artistic forebears but their mission was serious-minded. After Seagram, was it all flotsam and jetsam, pop art and fun? And if so, did that matter?

As Ken – the (fictionalised) assistant here – exclaims in an eruption stoked by suffering months of condescension and lordly demands: “Not every painting has to rip your guts out and expose your soul!” Rothko has judged the world unequal to his art. In doing so, has he turned his back on life?

It’s an exhilarating showdown: Alfred Molina’s stout, bald, bespectacled and pugilistic Rothko watches in stern, momentarily silenced appraisal, as his lithe young protégé-cum-skivvy – asked to think for himself, but not too much – rips chunks out of his arrogant master, like a young lion challenging the head of the pride. The scene is as gripping as the contrasting one earlier when the two men achieve a mute solidarity as they vigorously prime a blank canvas, spattering paint like blood in an abattoir, toiling to obliterate the white.

Just as we’re encouraged to realise there’s no such thing as a basic wash of colour – everything requires contemplation – so there’s no such thing as a simple debate about art. The evening – only 90 minutes – serves as a fascinating biographical footnote but pivots into something more profound and probing. In this beautiful production, intensifications of lighting suddenly deepen and enrich the colours, transforming the studio’s hangings. Just what are we looking at?

Alfred Molina and Alfred Enoch

Molina is older, heavier, sadder – no less commanding – than he was at the Donmar in 2009; some of Rothko’s thinking-aloud flows past like busy Manhattan traffic, could usefully slow a little, yet there’s no discernible join between actor and character. A face from the Harry Potter films and as agile as a Wimbledon ball-boy as he darts about the replica studio, Alfred Enoch doesn’t quite match the intensity of Eddie Redmayne, who scooped awards as the decreasingly submissive gofer last time, and blazed with memorable anguish.

Yet the youth’s transformation is still vividly relayed. And further niggling is beside the point. It’s a joy to have this modern classic back, splendidly played, and finally reaching the wider audience it was denied – through dint of its Broadway-transferring success – last time round.

Until July 28. For tickets call 0844 871 2118 or visit ticketmaster.co.uk