Art (tour)

Since the programme still carries the name of Matthew Warchus as director
of the original production, we must assume that this latest Art offering, directed by Thea
Sharrock and from the same production house, is in some way an attempt to
re-create the quality product that has been available to Londoners since
1996. If so, it has to be noted that the play’s reputation for being
actor-proof, based on a march-past of national and international star names,
begins to look a little vulnerable when it’s peopled with regional soap
actors.

Set up like Huis Clos (but without the existentialism), and sparely set
(design by Mark Thompson, lighting by Hugh Vanstone) so as to be magnificently
redolent of nouvelle vague cinema, with sunlight illuminating tall bare walls
through the jalousies, Artis a quintessentially French piece. Triggered by Serge’s acquisition of a white-on-white painting for 200,000 francs, three old friends find themselves tearing one another apart, sometimes hilariously,
questioning the very basis of their friendship and putting the bits back
together again.

Unsurprisingly, this has nothing whatsoever to do with art,
though the aesthetic modernism of Serge (played here by Simon Shepherd in
a lightweight performance which hardly extends beyond camp hysteria) and the
allegedly philistine literalism of Marc (a coolly sardonic Leigh Lawson,
far outclassing both his companions on stage) supply the polarities
between which this verbal fencing fest is pitched. Somewhere in the middle
is Philip Franks as Yvan, who really doesn’t care either way about the art
but who behaves like a petulant junior at some minor English Public School as
he envisages his forthcoming nuptials. His big comic set piece, panicking
over invitations, is mangled both by his own failure to pace its closely
crafted frenetic crescendo as by Shepherd’s premature rejoinder.

Yasmina Reza has won a rackful of awards for Art, and so far as one can tell, she has been well served by perhaps our best translator-from-French,
Christopher Hampton. The resulting English version remains wordy, pyrotechnic rather than profound,
but sure-footed in its charting of constant, often amusingly contradictory,
emotional shifts. Essentially a talking-heads piece, it’s hugely flattered
by the staging values of this production, both visually and in the startling
sound interventions of composer Gary Yershon and sound designer Mic Pool.

Undercasting, however, proves to be a bad mistake on this occasion and invites the audience
to wonder whether the play hasn’t been a touch overrated in the star-struck
theatre capitals of western Europe and the US. More importantly, we can only
hope this production does not mark a reversion to the bad old policy of
palming off the provinces with reserve team standards.

– Ian Watson (reviewed at Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre)