Yasmina Reza’s multi-award winning comedy explores the relationship between three men and a rather controversial piece of art, as one man’s friends try and dissect and understand what appears to be a blank canvas. In Sian Hughes and Makoto Kawaguchi’s production of Christopher Hampton’s translation of Art, a complicated piece of drama is tackled both with ease and with style, with an injection of life unseen in the Barn, to this degree, for a while.
Audiences are instantly greeted by an unusual set, with the usual audience ‘ranks’ retained, but the backmost row removed and replaced by an A-shaped flank around the stage, the focal point the piece of art that is repeatedly hung and removed upstage centre over the course of the play. With no real offstage and complicated staging to ensure that blind spots are effectively dealt with, Hughes and Kawaguchi’s production is extremely successful in creating a claustrophobic performance in which the audience very much feel like an intruding fly on the wall.
Katie Lambert’s lighting design assists in this, the colour-coded washes illuminating the audience who flank the stage, a brighter white light filling it the rest of the time. Occasional changes in brightness and direction of the light help to mix up the performance without distracting at all from a very talented cast, who never fail to impress.
There are no weak links, nor strongest performers, in this cast. The chemistry between Ryan Hall, Freddy Elletson and Chris White is electric, their characterisation illuminating the stage and adding colour to the blank canvas piece of ‘art’ that the play centres on. Elletson’s Serge, an art enthusiast and occasionally pompous collector mirrors well Hall’s Marc – a less enthusiastic man who fails to understand his friend’s 200,000 franc purchase. These are balanced well by White’s Yvan, a soon-to-be-married friend who adds an extra, very humorous, dimension to the play.
Physical comedy is a great strength in this production, as is pace, with actors consistently keeping the energy of the performance, even in silent sequences, at an unusual high. Of particular note is White’s monologue somewhere in the middle of the play where he extremely successfully pulls off a high-speed and yet multi-layered explanation of a series of events. Elletson and Hall, meanwhile, perfectly compliment this speech with their reactions – a common theme in the play.
Perhaps the main drawback with Art is its failure to always provide fully-developed characters, with accents and gestures occasionally becoming confused, though these are teething issues that will likely iron out in future performances, as well as some occasional mistakes with cues and lines.
Despite these minor issues, Art is a hilariously funny and brilliantly executed piece of drama that is definitely worth a watch, with a perfect combination of poignancy, outright hilarity and measured drama.