THE AUSTRALIAN
MON 12 APR 1999
All's mostly white on the night 
By JOHN McCALLUM 
Theatre 
Art 
By Yasmina Reza. Translated by Christopher Hampton. Director: Rachel Kavanaugh. Theatre Royal, Sydney.

ART starts out with a minimalist white-on-white painting -with lots of easy laughs about the pretension of modernism and 
the gullibility of the art market -and ends up teaching the audience how to see it.

Self-styled art connoisseur Serge spends 200,000 francs on an early allwhite work by a now fashionably expensive artist. 
His mentor, Marc, is sceptical and cruelly dismissive of the painting and, by implication, of his protege's whole life. 
Their nice loser friend, Yvan, is called in as a judge, but he is pathetically tolerant of both sides because he doesn't 
really care about anything outside his own miserable concerns. All three of them learn to read their own lives in the 
picture and, if that is not a sign of a successful work of art, then what is?

An all-white painting is not a blank canvas. Serge, the enthusiast, claims that it is deeply layered with different shades 
of white and, in a moment of ingratiating, puppy-dog fervour, Yvan claims to see all sorts of colours in it.

It certainly becomes deeply layered with their projected anxieties. Even Marc, who hates it, hates it with an enthusiasm 
that allows him eventually to see in it the landscape with hidden figures he wants to see. We in the audience see the 
picture, at the beginning, as a joke and, by the end, as a touching image of the emotions we have seen played out in front 
of it.

The play itself is minimalist -90 minutes of boys bickering wittily about a picture -but, by the last moments, we have a 
clear idea of what has been missing during the 15 years they have known each other. The austere empty space of the white 
painting is a metaphor for what they have collectively failed to articulate.

The play is not quite as funny as the hype surrounding this production has suggested. Its interest is in the interaction 
between three men facing a crisis in their friendship and this is treated without sentimentality and with great ambivalence. 
Marc, Serge and Yvan speak their thoughts and feelings only in asides to the audience.

Their real interactions are all covert, hidden in a cloud of civilised chat, with lurking jungle savagery. It is a good, 
unambitious play about the dynamics of male friendship, written by a woman with a cool understanding of her characters, 
but it is difficult to know quite why it has swept the world with such stunning success -and why it comes to the Theatre 
Royal with such a blaze of publicity. The production was a bit woolly on opening night -the engagement between the three 
men uncertain and faltering until the last 20 minutes. The individual performances are good, but the relationships are at 
first unclear.

Tom Conti's Marc is a beautiful study of a neurotically disdainful cynic masked as an amiable friend, his sneering voice 
emerging from a boyish, smiling face.

Geoff Morrell, who stepped in late to the role of Serge, creates a character nicely poised between genuine enthusiasm and 
arty pretension. David Wenham's Yvan is indecisive, partly because he is sincerely friendly and partly because he is cringingly 
self-obsessed. Such contradictions are at the heart of the play. You wonder how these three very different blokes became old 
friends.

It all emerges in the long last scene of confrontation, when the painting is forgotten for a time and the three turn on each 
other to confront what it is about their mateship that is of value, other than the supercilious Marc's need to be adored, the 
servile Serge's need to become independent and the fence-sitter Yvan's need to be strong. They don't find much but they do 
find something, genuine friendship perhaps, hidden in the blank whiteness.

The painting is finally hung, glowing at the centre of the bare grey setting and, you know, there's something in it.