FRIENDSHIP HITS THE ROCKS OF TASTE : MISCHIEVOUS, SAD AND FUNNY
Not everything that tours the country is Agatha Christie or star-fed froth: sometimes a serious emotional and intellectual treat turns up just down the road from where you live, probably around twenty quid a ticket. Isn’t theatre wonderful? This certainly is: thirty years after its opening, Yasmina Reza’s ART is still a favourite, its sly wise originality caught wonderfully from the French by Christopher Hampton’s translation.
Forget the usual dramatic themes of romance and family angst (though heaven knows that’s referred to). This, in 90 minutes, deals with another kind of bond, the pitfalls and bonds of friendship – especially, dare I say it, male friendship. Iqbal Khan directs, enchantedly coming brand-new to it, he fell in love, and in the programme draws his own thoughts about the comedy’s painful undercurrent (Reza, when it was referred to as comedy, famously said she thought she had written a tragedy; though I find the ending rather soothingly redemptive) .
Anyway, it’s simple enough: Serge, a wealthy consultant dermatologist, has bought a contemporary painting from £ 200,000, and his friend Marc – former mentor in some sense , we will learn – drops in and is shown it. It is just a huge white square. Serge, who likes to talk of contemporary and fashionable ‘deconstruction” , is affronted when Marc, an engineer, laughs at it and its mad price. “It’s shit”. Physically, they are an interesting contrast: Chris Harper’s Serge slim and smooth in blue, Aden Gillett’s Marc a big bluff scoffer, scruffier and contemptuous.
That Serge is wounded, snubbed, is obvious. The third of the friends is different again – Seann Walsh, curly-haired and amiable, is Yvan, who tries with each of them to heal the misunderstanding and the wounded pride. He is far less successful in life, embroiled in a complicated row about his coming wedding, rival mothers-in-law, and the horror of working for his bride’s father’s stationery company “Does any man wake up every morning looking forward to selling expandable document wallets?” he cries in misery late on. His attempts at mediation, offering to join in the art-crit nonsense about monochromatic resonances with Serge and acting tactful with Marc, is doomed.
Each of them criticizes the other to him :”Marc is moody” says Serge, and Serge says Marc “doesn’t have the training or instinct” to appreciate the white square and is stuck with boring “Flemish” landscapes (I daresay in France this was an awful insult). But he also insults the picture in Yvan’s house (Ciaran Bagnall creates a nice simple moving set, lined with light, no fuss) . Says it’s a “daub”, forgetting that Yvan’s Dad painted it. Serge’s artistic claims are satirically brilliant, skewering the language, like the claim that the white blank “stakes its claim as part of a trajectory”.
Seann Walsh, better known as a standup and new to the “legit” stage, treats the play with delicate honesty and – in the moment Yvan gets a proper raging collapse – is wickedly, wickedly funny. And sad. For the dazzlingly written, horribly credible text leads the three deeper and deeper and, since they’re men, to a moment of ridiculous but painful violence and beyond. It all moves fast, deceptively simple, a few piano notes by Max Pappenheim between the scenes. Altogether, it strikes every note right. A tiny masterpiece, delicately done, is coming your way soon.
Touring, Mercury Colchester from tonight
then Malvern, Eastbourne, Nottingham , Coventry Sheffield
originaltheatre.com to 20 Oct
rating five
theatreCat 