★★★★½
Friendship can survive distance. It can survive new jobs, new partners, fluctuating bank balances and the slow indignities of middle age. Whether it can survive a white painting is another question.
Yasmina Reza’s ART, first staged in Paris in 1994, has now been translated into 30 languages and has lived long enough to become a modern classic. Its Australian history stretches back to a 1999 premiere starring Tom Conti, Geoff Morrell and David Wenham.
This new national production, directed by Lee Lewis, arrives in Adelaide with a world-renowned trio of screen and stage stars at its centre: Richard Roxburgh, Damon Herriman and Toby Schmitz.
Serge, played by Herriman, has bought an expensive painting. It is white. Mostly white, anyway. Like Winston Fisk in Daredevil, he sees something in the snowstorm. Marc, played by Roxburgh, is appalled. Yvan, played by Schmitz, tries to keep the peace while his own life collapses under wedding logistics, family pressure and the emotional violence of invitations and in-laws.
That is the plot. Reza needs little more. ART is almost all talk. No murders, no affairs. No one bursts through a door with a secret will. The pace comes from language, accusation and the humiliating speed with which old friends can turn forensic.
It may be harder to imagine a group of Australian blokes ending a friendship over opinions on a work of art. Footy maybe? Perhaps it depends on the social circles one moves in. On campus at theatre school? Certainly. In higher social strata? Quite possibly. At the pub after indoor cricket? Maybe less so.
Yet the play has gained a new relevance since 1994. Friends have always drifted apart because they fall in love, change careers, earn more money, lose status or begin wanting different lives. Reza’s men are in their forties. This is the age when choices start to calcify. You can no longer pretend every road remains open.
Now there is another force at work. Our algorithms diverge. Our newsfeeds diverge. We can grow up together, agree on most things, then wake up years later, inhabiting different versions of reality.
ART predates that shock but speaks to it. Marc does not merely dislike Serge’s painting. He cannot grasp how a person he knows so well could sincerely value it. From there, the friendship begins to wobble.
Reza trained at Jacques Lecoq, and that physical theatre background hums beneath the language. Lewis makes generous use of it. Herriman’s black swivel chair spins with faintly absurd menace. Roxburgh twerks at the offending painting, as if ridicule might force it to confess. Jackets are pulled on and off through Yvan’s sprawling monologue about why he is late, a domestic nightmare that Schmitz milks for every laugh.
Herriman’s Serge is refined; the polar opposite of Dewey from Justified. Maybe just as obsessed with artistic status as Charlie Manson, who he has played on screen twice, including for Tarantino (who definitely loses friends when debating taste in art).
Charles Davis dresses him in pale cream shades and immaculate tailoring. He appears soft at first glance, then increasingly brittle. Serge’s home, revealed with a ding of sound and a flick of light, carries the same modernist cool.
Roxburgh’s Marc enters from another aesthetic planet. His charcoal denim and black leather give him a gruff, self-declared maverick quality. Marc’s taste runs to the traditional. His painting is a rustic landscape. Yvan’s prized artwork is a picture of a collie painted by his father.
Davis’s set and costume design turns the three homes into competing philosophies. Serge favours what is modern, rare and expensive. Marc prefers something legible, something with roots. Yvan treasures sentiment. Which matters more? Tradition? Affection? The thrill of the new? The market value attached to taste?
Adelaide has these arguments in public every time a council commissions fresh street art. Bronze pigs in Rundle Mall. Shiny pigeons. A mural someone calls vibrant, and someone else calls a waste of rates. Reza simply brings the same argument indoors, pours it a drink and lets it ruin a friendship.
The set is deceptively simple. A mottled floor. Grey walls. A chic metallic circular table. As the first half unfolds, walls extend, and paintings are revealed, accompanied by precise sound cues from David Letch for System Sound and lighting shifts by Paul Jackson.
Davis avoids the sterile white-box look associated with many productions of ART. The room is spare, but not empty. It holds enough style to make us notice how style itself becomes a weapon.
The three actors are friends in real life, and that rapport shows. Their timing is elastic. Their interruptions land with the confidence of people who understand one another’s rhythms. These are stars of stage and screen, but the production never rests on celebrity. It rests on trust. The trust to wound. The trust to make long passages of argument feel alive.
At times, ART resembles a philosophical dialogue in designer loafers. Seneca is mentioned. Positions are advanced, sharpened and rebutted. Yet Reza is more interested in taboo than abstraction. What parts of a friend’s life are open to critique? A painting? A financial decision? A romantic partner?
Marc mocks Serge’s art purchase. Serge retaliates by attacking Marc’s love life. Marc’s partner believes in homeopathy, a detail that lands with extra sting after the pandemic. Roxburgh later chugs down homeopathic remedies like a pelican swallowing a fish. The image is ridiculous. The argument underneath it is not.
Which choices should be submitted to reason? Which belong to emotion? What is the better metric? Evidence? Loyalty? The refusal to humiliate someone you love?
Friendships often survive because people practise small acts of concealment. Do not say you hate the restaurant suggestion every time. Do not litigate each dubious wellness habit. Do not turn taste into a tribunal. The play keeps asking when honesty becomes narcissism.
The characters occasionally break the fourth wall beneath spotlights, confessing what they cannot say to one another. That device helps expose their inner evasions, though it can also make the play tell where it might otherwise show.
Marc announces that he is going to Yvan’s house. Characters explain feelings in asides rather than always allowing them to seep through behaviour. Yet that very artificiality serves the play to a degree. These men are not showing each other everything. Friendship contains performance. Civility is often a small collaborative fiction.
As a critic, it is amusingly dangerous to sit in judgment of a play about the validity of judgment. ART seems to know that every position in the room can be both absurd and sincere.
Marc may be cruel. Serge may be pretentious. Yvan may be weak. They may also each be partly right. The audience at Her Majesty’s laughed broadly and often. Some viewers will side with Marc. Some with Serge. Some will want to take Yvan out for a strong drink and a quiet nap.
After three decades, Reza’s play still holds because it recognises how easily taste becomes identity, and how quickly identity becomes war. Lewis’s production gives it polish, bite and terrific comic pulse. It is smart without becoming bloodless. Funny without losing its sadness.
In the end, getting along with one another may matter more than proving that your painting, your worldview or your dinner order is superior.
Art runs in Adelaide to 24 May at Her Majesty’s Theatre for 8 shows only as the final stop on the national tour. 58 Grote Street Adelaide SA 5000.
Art is presented by Rodney Rigby, Marriner Group, Paul Wheelton AM and State Theatre Company South Australia.
Tickets: https://arttheplay.com.au/tickets/adelaide/
Website: https://www.arttheplay.com.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/arttheplayau/
Photo credit: Brett Boardman
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