Simon Jenner May 11th 2024
Kay also considerably adapts and cut by a third Christopher Hampton’s chiselled translation. As designer Kay’s pristine neutralities of light walls and furnishings are hinted on this small stage with sheets and undistracting minimal furnishings. The white painting itself’s well wrought: a gleaming white scar diagonally slices down its impassive matte.
Reza joked of her Olivier Comedy award: “I’m surprised, I thought I’d written a tragedy.” This visceral but almost (dare one say, given the subject) cubist probing of the hairline crack between the two both affirms and denies Reza’s claim she’s not a cerebral writer.
At one point the word “deconstruct” gets the farcical treatment (such apparent pretensions always raise a laugh over here). Nevertheless it’s what Reza’s doing consummately to the reflex of male and – here – female friendship: habits, bondings that turn out spasms of something either extinct or never quite uttered. Packed and edited down from ninety into sixty minutes (Art for once really is shorter than life) it’s just that concentration of themes that confirms this a classic, durable work.
Though francs are mentioned Hampton persists with feet and inches, not metres. Elsewhere he anglicises. It’s curious: this is still France.
Marc can’t accept his protégé Colette (originally Serge), the man to whom he introduced Seneca and Paul Valéry, has been seduced into paying 200,000 euros (this updated) for “white shit.” That’s a 1970s canvas whose only depth resides in scumblings that throw beige, grey or red tints according to obliging Yvan who accommodates to Colette whilst not quite believing himself.
It’s Dearlove’s Colette, who’s bought the infamous white painting, who hosts the scene where three-quarters of the play is set. After various duettings – including the delicious introduction where Colette thrusts Marc to different views of a white canvas – the trio meet to devastating effect. It’s then the chemistry catalyses. Indeed the clownish, luckless but now people-pleasing Yvan of Henderson is finally accused of facilitating just this because he’s brokering common ground. He becomes the site, literally another white tabula rasa where the diametrically confronting egos of James’s Marc and Dearlove’s Colette skirmish and dump their venom.
James is all spidery contraction with a sudden unravel and pounce mechanism. He exudes the classically-limited French mind, a famously severe caste: he’s an engineer with a philosophe bent.
Dearlove’s Colette, svelte, slightly hurt, seemingly reasonable, disguises her ferocity: like Yvan initially, she might feel honesty’s an overrated virtue, but can’t let go of Marc’s disapproval. Colette leans to modish abstraction, boulevard philosophizing, a hazy relativism that infuriates Marc’s hard cynic stance. How did Colette get away?
You wonder at their original dynamics. Again there’s that hidden all-white metaphor of tabula rasa, Colette’s mind written upon: Marc’s striking phrase about only loving where there’s “my faith in their potential” suggests just that.
Whereas James’s range mimics a dial of mild to acute splenetics, Dearlove mercurially calibrates pretension (ways of seeing the painting) on vulnerability (removing it) to ganging up on Henderson’s Yvan, all checked with a patina of entitlement.
Henderson in fact delivers the great Lucky-like speech blurting out his lateness as part of a marriage preparation crisis, so haplessly neurotic the audience sigh as they might for a dog who just misses a hat-trick on a talent show.
Henderson’s shaggy dog approach, resonant and eschewing brittleness steals this show and earns spontaneous, prolonged applause (apparently every night). It’s Yvan who professes to know nothing, who also refuses certainties, the beginning of knowledge. But he can’t afford to admit this even to himself till the end.
It’s this betrayal of Marc’s ownership of Colette’s aesthetics that threatens to splinters three friendships, though we end with a pittering of olives if not breaking bread. Male (and here, male/female) friendships Reza shows here have often to revolve around things, a dynamic of knowledge as power. But when those certainties are literally erased we’re left with – as Marc finally projects meaning onto the canvas – a man struggling through a diagonal line of snow. Snow-blind perhaps.
Kay’s lighting deftly plays with the infamous painting itself: at one memorable moment enshrining the thing in a kind of nimbus. Other canvases are sheeted in white till a change of scene.
Music skewers chic pointillism though certain chords arrive as a nervous tic, like a drunk banging his head against a policeman.
These are all strong performances: Dearlove seething in her impassive mask, breaking out as group dynamics steer her to old resentments. James obstreperous, simply unable to stop tearing off bandages of every wound of the past thirty years, including his own ego. Henderson naturally earns plaudits: not just for that Lucky speech, but stripping to vulnerability, then mining a tough reasonableness just beyond it.
Can we sneer thirty years on? In 1816 Turner’s paintings were dismissed as “pictures of nothing, and very like”. So now this painting mightn’t elicit the same giggle as it did to an audience not nurtured on the Tate Modern for over two decades. But it’s Yvan’s worry about telling another white lie to build rickety bridges back to Marc and Colette, that asks dangerous questions of just what the ‘art’ of friendship consists of, and why.
‘Art’
Reza asks dangerous questions of just what the ‘art’ of friendship consists of, and why.
Rialto Productions
Ironworks
Reza asks dangerous questions of just what the ‘art’ of friendship consists of, and why.
Sophie Dearlove, Duncan Henderson and Neil James dazzle in this Old Vic revival of Art adapted,directed and designed by Roger Kay.
Christopher Hampton’s translation is very adapted.
Till May 11th