All white on the night
Author: STEPHEN DUNNE
Date: 09/04/1999
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald

Three men and a canvas are bringing ART to Sydneysiders in a play that has
already seen plenty of drama, writes STEPHEN DUNNE.
After the controversy, after the cast change, after reams of publicity,
it's finally time to check out the art of ART. First we had the brouhaha
over the producer's decision to cast British import Tom Conti, after
trying more than half a dozen local actors - all of whom said no - and
then to have Richard Roxburgh drop out so he could go Cruising on Mission
Impossible 2. Then one of the local stars, John Waters, developed
glandular fever. With more than a million dollars in advance bookings and
previews imminent, the producers quickly nabbed Geoff Morrell as Waters's
replacement, for the season which opens at the Theatre Royal tomorrow
night.

Despite all the off-stage drama, the play itself starts simply enough: "My
friend Serge has bought a painting. It's a canvas, about five foot by
four: white. The background is white and if you screw up your eyes,you can
make out some fine white diagonal lines."

A white painting, featuring white lines on a white background. A neat joke
on High Modernism, a genuine work of art, or a blank screen for the
characters to project the corrosion of their friendship? Perhaps it's all
three.

Yasmina Reza's short, deceptively simple play of painting, theory and
mates has become a global theatrical phenomenon, translated into more than
20 languages and produced around the world. The London production has
passed its 1,000th performance and the play has won awards in London and
New York.

Originally written in French, ART was translated into English by
Christopher Hampton, who is best known for his translations of Ibsen (he
taught himself Norwegian), his definitive version of Les Liaisons
Dangereuses and his own plays, including Savages and The Philanthropist.

Hampton's agent sent him Reza's first play in the mid-'80s. He was
impressed with the work, but nothing came of it. "We tried to get various
people interested in doing it in London, without success," says Hampton.
"It was definitely believed in the '70s and '80s that foreign plays
somehow wouldn't go in London.

"A few years later, I was staying in Paris doing some work and I walked
around the corner and past the Theatre de Champs Elysee and there was this
play with a rather intriguing title. When I came up to look at the poster,
lo and behold it was by Yasmina. I went to the box office and said could I
have a ticket and they said no.

"I thought hello, there's something going on here, and I went back that
evening and got a return, and I thought the play was wonderful. I started
to make inquiries about it, and eventually my agent called me up and said
I'm afraid the rights have been secured by Sean Connery, so I said don't
be ridiculous, but anyway, so it proved to be. I suppose it was made known
to Sean that I was very interested in it, and in the fullness of time, the
phone rang and there's this mellow Scottish accent on the other end, and I
was hired."

ART was discovered by Connery's French wife Micheline, who was so
impressed after seeing it in Paris that she persuaded him to buy the
rights. Having a famous actor as a producer can't hurt a show, but Hampton
reckons ART gets there on its own merits: "I think it deals with universal
truths that I haven't seen dealt with in other plays, like the evasions
and difficulties and compromises of friendship. In a way, the white
painting is just a pretext, it's a wonderful pretext, but the play is
really about these three friends.

"I've seen some reviews which said, 'We can't understand why these people
are friends'. Well, you often can't understand why people are friends.
That's the given of the play. You can't always account for why your
friends are the people you're friends with," says Hampton.

The friends in question are art buyer Serge (Morrell), hypercritical Mark
(Conti) and the softer, fuzzier Ivan (David Wenham). The three men - and
it's very much a play about blokes and the way they relate - have been
friends for 15 years, yet the play starts just as their friendship is set
to implode.

Hampton was surprised to discover the inspiration for ART came from life:
"Yasmina came to the first night in London with a friend, and she
introduced me to him afterwards and said, 'This is Serge' and I said,
'Hello, Serge', and she said, 'He once bought a white painting'. It's just
one of those things that happened in her life that was a light bulb. I
don't think anything comparable to the play happened in Serge's life - I
hope not - but the idea didn't come out of the blue, as it were," he says.

"One thing that's interesting is the way different national audiences
react to it. Yasmina was slightly taken aback at the amount of laughter,
which was noticeably more than in France. Eventually I attributed that to
English philistinism - intrinsically finding the whole business of modern
art more amusing than the French. But it was interesting, and I've found
this with my own plays, in different countries people do laugh in
completely unexpected places. For example, the Americans always find
anything to do with men being hen-pecked hilarious ... I don't know why."

Hampton enjoys translating as a break from his own writing, but says that
ART was the first time he had to deal with the inconvenience of an author
with strong opinions who was still alive.

"She was a hard taskmaster - I think in a very good way - and was
absolutely meticulous about querying things, and coming to rehearsals. Her
language is very precise and slightly unusual - it's naturalistic.

"The problem set the translator is you have to make it seem as if it's
plausibly happening, but they do phrase things in an unexpected way quite
often. You have to try and reproduce that.

"My own belief is that the translator should be slightly like a pane of
glass, transparent, that you should not feel aware of any intermediary
personality between the play and the audience. At its best, it's sort of
like stage lighting, a self-effacing exercise in which you just try and
make, in the case of lighting the actors, in the case of translation, look
as good as possible."

And what of Hampton's own taste in art? He confesses that he wouldn't be
in the market for the modernist white-on-white.

"I'm very drawn to dramatic treatments or dramatic discussions about the
implications of painting, even though my own tastes are rather
fuddy-duddy.

"If I had the money I'd buy a Gauguin rather than a Jackson Pollock. You
can just say I'm generally interested in painting."

In ART, as in life, it's important to know what you like.

ART is at the Theatre Royal until the end of June.

The man in the middle

He's been a seaside spunk in SeaChange and the ugly face of blokedom in
The Boys. In ART, David Wenham plays Ivan - the friend who doesn't know
much about art and doesn't really know what he likes either.

"Poor Ivan, put through the wringer. This man who attempts to mend the
peace between his two best friends, they turn on him, and his attempts
become more inflammatory than helpful in the end," says Wenham.

"You certainly feel for the man because he is a guy on edge and he doesn't
particularly need this ridiculous feud. His preparation for his wedding
and the break-up of his friendship with his best mates all seems to happen
on the same day."

Ivan does, however, get a very big speech. "Tom Conti refers to it as my
long speech. I'd really hate any expectation to be put on this speech
because otherwise it turns into a little bit of a 'turn' in the show and
it actually shouldn't be. It should just be this guy who comes on stage
and he's got two sentences. One's a short one, and the next one's a very
very long one, and it's a long time before the full stop comes.

"The thing is, he's got an incredible amount of information to impart, and
at the end of it, nothing's resolved. Technically it's a bit of a feat
because you've got to get a few breaths in there somewhere. It's like
squeezing a volcano zit from a long distance from the mirror and
absolutely covering it. You know the ones!"

Dramatic explosions apart, Wenham likes ART's observations of men in private.

"The play is essentially about what binds us together, and it's
interesting that it's been written by a female; her observations are spot
on. But it's male behaviour in private - it's how men behave when they're
with each other, which is slightly different. Slightly."

SD

The man about town

Tom Conti loves performing but hates acting. As in "Arcting" (with or
without the appended "dahhhling").

"Acting is at once very simple and extremely complicated," he says, lush
eyelashes fluttering, voice dripping charm. "There's so much told by the
words - actors make this mistake a lot of the time of acting.

"If I'm directing something in England I'm constantly having to say to
actors, 'please don't invest the words with their own meaning'. We know
what it means! If the line is, 'I'm going to shoot you in the liver', you
don't have to say, 'I'M going to SHOOT you IN the LIVER' - you just say it
and everybody understands - you're going to get shot in the liver, it's a
bad start to the day.

"It's the same with anything, you don't have to portray, you just have to
say what the man has written, obviously in whatever character you've
chosen, whatever manner you've chosen, but there's a simplicity that makes
things work."

And what happens for Conti the moment someone starts acting? "It's over.
Bring the curtain down and taxi!"

Conti's also not overly fond of rehearsals - at least as compared with
actually performing. "I find rehearsing sort of embarrassing, you know,
standing on the floor with a small group of people pretending to be
somebody else. When you're a young actor it's all great fun and very
intense and hey, you're creating art, but as you get older it becomes
silly."

He does, however, like the play. "It's good entertainment. I ask two
questions always if I read something - one, will I enjoy doing it, and,
more importantly, two, would an audience want to come out of the house of
an evening and spend money to see it? Will they enjoy it? And if I think
the answer to two is definitely yes, it's yes, so with this, the answer is
yes."

He describes his character, Mark, as utterly self-obsessed. "Everything in
life, as far as he's concerned, revolves around him. That's the only way
he can rationalise anything, that's the only way he can get through the
day." Conti drops into Mark and gestures grandly at the Pyrmont wharves:
"All this - all these sheds were built because they knew I was coming
here."

His own coming here was not entirely smooth. Conti was amazed at the
controversy over his casting: "It lingered for a long time - I was amazed.
It sold a lot of seats! In London, that amount of publicity would have
cost us #40,000. So thanks, guys! The union looks after us," he says.

"I felt no personal animosity at all from any of the actors. I know what
actors are like and if any of these actors had come to England during the
Christmas period they'd have heard all the yelling and screaming about
Australians being brought in to do pantomime. It just happens everywhere -
in the south of Italy they complain about actors from Florence being
brought down. I lived in Scotland for years and they were always whingeing
about why are all these English actors up here, doing us out of a job.

"The business is name-run, and there's nothing you can do about that and
everybody wants to be a name and every actor wants to be well known and
enjoy the fruits of that."

SD