ART

Art is about three blokes, friends for years, arguing angrily about one purchasing an all-white modernist painting, but that’s just the trigger.  Extensively translated and staged around the world since it’s Paris premiere in 1994, it’s astonishing that Yasmina Reza‘s play is still so popular and her male trio so convincing across so many borders.

The crisp and witty English translation by the brilliant Christopher Hampton certainly helps, and in this production so do Charles Davies’ designs: creating a sophisticated cool space, part international hotel, part gallery, perfect for these men finding their feet in a new world.  

It’s also the apartment of affluent, just divorced dermatologist Serge (Damon Herriman) where, bubbling with excitement, he shows off his new painting to his mate and once mentor Marc (Richard Roxburgh).  It could be London or New York but certainly Roxburgh is unmistakeably Australian, incredulous at a younger friend he thought he knew paying 160K Euros for a blank canvas, and furious at Serge’s alienating new talk about artists and deconstructionism.

Marc makes an ally with Yvan, a self-deprecating stationary retailer on the eve of marriage, played by Toby Schmitz, but when he’s presented with the painting, beyond giggles, Yvan is too scared to take sides.

Soon both sides turn on Serge for his cowardice and self-involvement.  Schmitz makes a lovely fond boofhead, as he gabbles on, tearfully exasperated at the step-mothers still bickering over the wedding plans, and now lost in the cruel revelations of his friends.

Herriman’s Serge, dressed in soft gentlemen colours, sees himself as a “man of the time” and finds Marc intolerable for his obsessive control, hate and inability to accept new ideas and changing values.  The hostility between these dysfunctional friends ebbs and roars through the production, as each male attempts to win the point with yet more critical revelations about their friends. And no more so than Marc.  Roxburgh, dressed in black, is volcanic from his first words, and by end only partly do we know why his anger is so relentless. It’s an arch performance, but in this commercial theatre production, it certainly powers the play and some hilarious laughter.  

Director Lee Lewis masterfully moves the action, and the brief moments of reflection, across the full stage and this tall palladium set.  And there’s heaps of smart comic business between the actors. 

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman.