How well do we really know our long-term friends, and how much have our feelings for them changed over the years without anyone being bold enough to verbalise it?
Seann Walsh as Yvan, Chris Harper as Serge and Aden Gillett as Marc in ART | Photo © Geraint Lewis
This is the focus of Yasmina Reza’s dexterous and coruscating play Art, showing this week at Bath’s Theatre Royal at the start of its UK tour.
The set-up is simple; three middle-aged male friends find that their hitherto unchallenged camaraderie is put to the test when one of them spends £200,000 on a painting which is plain white.
A healthy discussion on what is art and what it is worth acts as a catalyst for challenging their assumptions about each other and slowly peeling off the veneer of social conformity. It turns ugly.
Your reaction to the play will depend on how entertaining or amusing you find the idea of three friends becoming increasingly nastier and more vitriolic to each other, though certainly this was garnering some laughs in the audience on opening night.
Like Reza’s other celebrated work God of Carnage, it’s an evening of middle-class characters replacing social nicety with venal attacks on each other. It’s a bleak view on humanity.
Director Iqbal Khan’s production is fast-paced and well-measured, capitalising on a striking set by Ciaran Bagnall which looks like a multi-coloured Cubist labyrinth of rooms replete with character-based colour schemes and neon lighting.
The design extends to careful costume choices by Nancy Surman, with each character’s clothes reflecting the colour of their different rooms, further emphasising the separation between these three erstwhile friends.
Performances are slick and imbued with both anger and vulnerability, and the actors fully convince as long-term friends, with an easy chemistry. Chris Harper is charming but suffused with complacency as Serge, the buyer of the troublesome painting.
Aden Gillett is a querulous, confrontational but finally vulnerable Marc, who ridicules Serge’s purchase. And endless people-pleaser Yvan is played with an endearing shamble by Seann Walsh, as a character caught in the crossfire before finally gaining the fortitude to speak his mind.
This is a smooth confident production and, at just 80 minutes long, leaves the audience with ample time afterwards to ask themselves what they would do in that situation. The answers may be challenging.
Art is at Theatre Royal Bath until 7th September. Box office: 01225 448844.
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Reviewer: Steve Huggins
