Roslyn Packer Theatre, February 19
8/10
Imagine if where you are reading this review was just white space. No words. What if, rather than missing words, the white space constituted a work of visual art? Nothingness would be just as valid as much else that passes for art, after all.
But what if your best friend buys a large painting that’s pure white, and, being painted by a collectible (read “fashionable”) artist, cost an eye-watering sum? Do you accept, question or rubbish this person’s taste? Does the existence of barely discernible (in the right light) diagonal stripes – also white, of course – play into this discourse? Do friendships crack and possibly shatter under such circumstances?
These are the games that French playwright Yasmina Reza plays with her three characters in this arch comedy, which was memorably staged in Sydney in 1999, with Tom Conti, Geoff Morrell and David Wenham playing Marc, Serge (the painting buyer) and Yvan, respectively. Now an equally stellar trio of Richard Roxburgh, Damon Herriman and Toby Schmitz attacks these roles, directed by Lee Lewis for four producers headed by Rodney Rigby.
It’s expert casting. Roxburgh intrinsically makes us warm to the spiky Marc, who believes Serge is crazy to be sucked into buying an expensive joke. Herriman puffs up Serge with ample pomposity, while leaving the door to congeniality ajar enough for us to allow that Serge has every right to spend his money as he chooses.
Schmitz, meanwhile, continues his golden run through Hamlet Camp and Grief is the Thing with Feathers, giving us an Yvan who’s such an affable oaf of an overgrown child that he could just about paper over the cracks in the Liberal Party, let alone a rift between friends.
Charles Davis’s 1990s costumes excessively delineate the differences between the three, however: Serge in the connoisseur’s garb of tailored pale suit over turtle-necked top; Marc casual in denim and leather; Yvan beyond casual in tee-shirt and trackies. It makes them look improbable friends before the friction starts to sting, as Reza pokes a stick into the wasps’ nest of taste, meaning, pretension and craft in modern art, and the seeming randomness of stardom. She simultaneously interrogates the nature of friendship, and how we may evolve away from the original bonds.
Lewis has beautifully conducted Reza’s finely tuned score of dynamics, as anger, disdain, hurt, and, above all, humour play out, Art being glitteringly witty at best, primarily thanks to Marc when he’s not too poisonous, or Yvan when he’s not too angst-ridden. Schmitz’s Yvan brings the house to tears of laughter in a diatribe about glitches in devising his wedding invitations. His chums, of course, tell him to pull the plug: they don’t want Yvan lost to the dreaded Catherine any more than Marc wanted to be usurped in Serge’s heart by a blizzard of whiteness.
If the world is piling weights upon you, this will provide blessed relief.
Until March 8.
https://www.roslynpackertheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2026/art