ART. To 31 May.

Tour.

ART
by Yasmina Reza translated by Christopher Hampton.

Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds tour to 31 May 2008.
Runs 1hr 35min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 12 May.

Production too often reduces Art to a cartoon.
There’s an art in taking a play that’s essentially about urban life and making it suit a tour of villages; even one ending in two major Suffolk towns, Ipswich and this company’s Bury St Edmunds home. Director Abigail Anderson’s method involves turning Yasmina Reza’s play about a three-way male friendship under threat into a vulgar display of comic histrionics that are excessive for the small space of a village hall and obscure the most important thing in Art, the human balance of the characters.

Serge has just bought an expensive new picture by a highly-reputed artist. The picture isn’t a blank canvas, but it is a study in white (on a larger stage it may seem plain white; at this proximity interesting ridges of paint are evident). Though a gallery-owner’s already offered a premium on the purchase price, his friend Marc thinks it’s ludicrous to pay so much for so little. Yvan floats between the two.

It’s the kind of extended, elegantly witty discussion that’s part of French dramatic tradition. The white painting represents anything that might disturb the long-held assumptions underlying a friendship. So it matters that we take each character seriously, along with his responses to the others, especially on the crisis evening when the three meet for a meal. This is the long, sustained scene which brings out the tensions glimpsed in short scenes and soliloquies around.

It’s a friendship salvaged when the art object is desecrated by consent, reasserting the primacy of the human relationships. This moment, with its comic visual addition works neatly. But the continual attempts at comic effect in the acting seriously undermine these characters.

Richard Tunley’s Marc comes off best, giving a sense of the sophisticate who turns to childishness under the provocation of sustained argument. And finds a release in it. His performance isn’t without an element of over-explication but it’s generally controlled.

Unlike Michael Onslow as Serge, the picture’s owner, whose constant parade of popping-eyes, squeezed facial expressions and over-explicit vocal expressions (to which James G Bellorini’s Yvan’s also prone) soon becomes a tiresome kind of talking-down to the audience.

Yvan: James G Bellorini.
Serge: Michael Onslow.
Marc: Richard Tunley.

Director: Abigail Anderson.
Designer: Cleo Pettitt.

2008-05-14 11:04:00