This work, which received the best-play Moliere Award in Paris, has, in its English version, gone on to win Evening Standard and Olivier Awards for best comedy. "Art" [sic] is indeed full of laughs but betrays an increasingly serious underpinning as it proceeds through its 85 intermissionless minutes. For 15 years three men have been good friends: Marc, an aeronautical engineer; Serge, a dermatologist; and Yvan, a sales agent for stationery, who is about to be married. Serge has just spent 200,000 francs for an unframed painting in the form of a 5-by-4-foot expanse of unrelieved white. Marc's traditional tastes drive him to brand the art repeatedly as "a piece of shit." Yvan tries to take a middle position, without much success.
The play is not so much about art as about the nature of friendship and its limits. What is the role of humor, of candor, of tolerance? Matthew Warchus' direction is faultless, right down to the pings of olive pits in a dish. [Warchus also helms the play's current Broadway mounting.] My only complaint is that by putting quotation marks around her title, Yasmina Reza has loaded the dice against Serge and his purchase; she would have done better to let audience members draw their own conclusions.
