16.01.1997

I know what I like

Tom Ball reviews 'Art', directed by Matthew Warchus (Wyndham’s Theatre, London - £9.50-£25)

Serge (Tom Courtenay), a Paris dermatologist, is extremely proud of his most recent acquisition: a 200,000-franc white canvas. It allegedly bears white diagonal stripes and a white stripe at the bottom: “How can you tell?” asks his boorish friend, Marc (Albert Finney), an aeronautical engineer. Here begins the end of a wonderful friendship.

Yasmina Reza’s play (translated by Christopher Hampton) bears down on one side on the misanthropic philistinism embodied in Marc, and on the other Serge’s ready acceptance of the artistically fashionable. Trapped in the middle, as a sort of wavering intellectual Everyman, is their mutual friend, Yvan (Ken Stott). But more than this aesthetic struggle emerges, since the friends find their comradeship questioned on a wider canvas than the postmodern commodity round which the action centres.

Deeper fault lines than disagreements over a sub-Rothko painting emerge. Serge seems largely to have shelled out for the “early Antrios” painting because the Pompidou Centre and the best Paris galleries have their own works by Antrios prominently displayed, and imagines that by buying he has aided artistic evolution. Marc vigorously attacks Serge’s pretension with an energy deriving not only from his abhorrence of a perceived waste of money, but his concern that his friend should be so at variance with his view of art. In fact, Marc’s friendship with Serge seems posited at this moment on whether or not their tastes agree, not on a more basic sense of caring for the other.

Yvan tries to acquiesce in the views of both his friends. This is fine so long as he is with each separately, but once they are all together his balancing act, which is at base a dishonest one, topples over when they each attack him for his prevarication. Marc and Serge do not let up on each other after shredding Yvan’s feelings: Serge drips acid words about Marc’s wife, tellingly as only an erstwhile close friend’s barbs can be. Before they know it, the two intellectuals are scrabbling at each other on the floor in a brawl.

Stott’s Yvan is the star of the play, posing the questions about the friendships that seem to have ebbed away, ineffably but piecemeal. Yet the conclusion sees a deliberate avoidance of resolution to the quandary they all face, their failure to confront their differences over art standing for their failure to assert their ideas as individuals. They take on Yvan’s earlier manner of elision and evasion in the end, their relationships weakened through lack of honesty and openness.

Tom Ball