ART

If you’ve ever over-spent in Athena you might be able to  understand the predicament faced by the three friends who make up the cast of ‘Art’.

Serge (Michael Thorne), Marc (Nevin Ward) and Yvan (Peter Buller) find their friendship is left in a precarious state after Serge buys a large, expensive and almost blank (except for a few diagonal lines) white painting. For him, it’s a trophy, a thing of wonder and delight that his ignorant art-neanderthal friends are simply unable to understand; for them, it’s a needless display of wealth and cultural snobbery on their friend’s part, an unfathomable action that only shows he is no longer the man they first knew. That, and they think the picture is rubbish.

What follows is a dissection of the group’s dynamic and friendship, played out through their reactions to the picture, and to each other’s reactions to it. The (almost) blank canvas becomes the battleground for their neuroses and buried concerns, a backdrop onto which they project their emotional wranglings and disasters. The actors handle the sometimes-clunky translation capably, veering from ferocious intellectual discussions to gentle witticisms as the warring factions – Serge and Marc – wrench apart popular conceptions about modern art and psychotherapy, all the while being mollified by Yvan (a convincing ‘man on the edge’ performance from Peter Buller) and hurtling down the road towards the end of their friendship.

Director Christine Ward deserves a nod for the excellent staging – Pateley Bridge’s thrust is effectively used to contrast the actors’ asides with testosterone- charged interactions between the three men, all the while stared down by the all-seeing painting, hovering in the background as the catalyst for the events unfolding before it – while the cast do an excellent job with a wordy, dense script, emerging with distinctive characters played with thoughtful sincerity and easy comic timing.

The play’s penultimate scene is an expertly handled exploration of the dynamic that exists between the three men, as they wrestle with their conflicting beliefs and attempt to reconcile things, their final treatment of the offending painting symbolic of the importance of their friendship over aesthetics. It’s a well-executed, stripped down take on an often-performed play - and a cautionary tale for art enthusiasts everywhere.

Kirsty McMurdo