Directing ART

Kitty Goodall chats with Lee Lewis about directing ART, which is touring Australia in 2026, and the fault lines between taste, ego, and love.

When friendship fractures over a painting, is it really about the artwork, or the people behind the opinions? Yasmina Reza’s ART, translated by Christopher Hampton, poses that question with surgical precision. In 2026, director Lee Lewis is leading a trio of acting titans — Richard Roxburgh, Damon Herriman, and Toby Schmitz — in an Australian production of this ninety-minute exploration of friendship, ego, and the uncomfortable truths that surface when someone buys a plain white painting and dares to call it genius. 

Lewis says ART is “the hardest play on the planet to do, and so it has to have the best actors in the country to do it,” because its emotional architecture hinges on authenticity. “This is just a play of conversations between friends and we’ve all got friends and we all fight with them,” she says. “To make that real and alive in front of the audience… if it’s a false note, it’s like the people who go to the symphony… all those people who go, ‘hang on, that was flat’. We are experts in conversations with friends.”

Lewis knows the terrain well. She’s had her share of passionate disagreements over visual art. “I’m a huge fan of Ken Done,” she says. “I adore him as a human and as an Australian artist I think he’s extraordinary and I’ve had huge arguments with some friends of mine about that.” For her, those arguments illuminate what ART is really about. “What I’ve learned about art is that conversation is a lightning rod for difference… it raises that question: can I still be friends with you if you think that?”

That idea sits at the heart of the play. The white painting becomes a provocation, not a punchline. Lewis continues: “Visual artists especially have borne the brunt of being that thin end of the wedge across time. We can talk viciously about the thing in front of us, forgetting there’s a human who created it behind it… we get into the deep end really quickly and we talk with such bile and entitlement.” The conversation loops from art to friendship to classism. “It’s okay to be a poor artist,” Lewis says, “but heaven forbid you should actually be able to reach out to people and let them have art in their lives.” She sees a link between ART’s provocations and Australian creatives including Done who’ve made expression attainable, saying: “It wasn’t supposed to be hugely elite, it was supposed to be good design accessible to people.”

The most elite aspect of this production of ART is the casting. When producer Rodney Rigby brought the project to Lewis, he had a simple condition: “I want to get the best actors in Australia,” she recalls him saying, “and if we can’t, we won’t do the play. Without the best actors it’s not worth doing.” That ambition echoes the play’s legacy. “She (Reza) put lightning in a bottle with this (play) back in the ’90s. The best actors in the world wanted to do this play, and it was really interesting in a strange way how easy it was to get the best actors in Australia to agree to this,” Lewis says. 

Beyond the celebrity, there’s craft and chemistry in ART. “The more theatre I’ve done, the more I realise how important it is for everybody to want to be in the room,” Lewis says. “Doing this play for me is like going back to my indie roots (where) the only reason people do the play is because they love the play and they love the people doing it. This is the joy of this one, everyone is 100 percent invested.” 

Still, she’s not interested in letting anyone rest on familiar instincts. “It’s not enough for them to just play the thing they’ve always played. All four of us are pushing each other into a place that’s demanding… the front of the play is fun but the back end of the play goes into some really huge questions about what friendship is and that’s really quite confronting.” For Lewis and her cast, the challenge is irresistible. “The better actors get, the more work they do, the hungrier they are for the challenges they had when they were just starting out, when everything was a challenge. That’s why they take on a play like this, because they’re hungry for a challenge, which means I’ve got to push them there too.”

Though ART was written nearly three decades ago, Lewis believes its questions are freshly urgent. “I think what she was saying… is still there as questions for men about how to be friends and how we change over time and what that desperate need for people to understand us is.” She notes that the conversations Reza raised about masculinity, vulnerability, and friendship remain painfully relevant. “A lot of those conversations about masculinity, about men, that were starting in the late 90s were shut down. And I think this play is rising again, allowing men to pick them up at a time when a lot of questions about identity have shifted.”

Her curiosity about male friendship is both intellectual and emotional. “It’s fascinating to me,” she says. “It’s interesting as a woman to ask these questions of a group of men. I’m asking some of the smartest minds in Australian theatre to examine male friendship. I don’t have the answers. The actors are leading this conversation.” Lewis points to the stark statistic that roughly 70 percent of Australian theatre audiences are women. “Why have men stopped going to the theatre? Because we’re not offering them something to speak to them,” she says. “That’s a really potent question at the moment.”

What does Lewis hope audiences take away, beyond superlatives about the craft? She’s inspired by the thought of foyer chatter overflowing into the audience’s lives. Her ideal outcome is for people to argue, dissect, and confess their own hypocrisies over a post-show drink. “This is a ninety-minute play, there’s got to be time in the night for a drink afterwards and a bit of bullshit. The play honestly is in the pub afterwards. People going out for a drink or dinner and really getting into all the things that matter… that’s what I want.” 

That desire for connection loops back to the title: ART may be about a painting, but it’s really about the art of staying friends, the art of seeing one another clearly, the art of forgiving the ugly brushstrokes, and still wanting to hang the relationship back on the wall. Lewis is happily forthright about what this project means to her. “This is a gift; it is a gift given to me by a great producer. It’s a gift I hope I’m giving great actors, and then it’s a gift that that group of actors will give to the whole country.”

ART by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton, directed by Lee Lewis, starring Richard Roxburgh, Damon Herriman and Toby Schmitz, tours nationally in 2026. Tickets for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are on sale now at www.arttheplay.com.au.