At its core, Yasmina Reza’s ‘ART’ is a riveting play that poses the all-important question: what does it truly mean to be a good friend to someone?
Part-comedic and part-catastrophic, the play follows three friends — Marc, Serge, and Yvan — and the chaos that ensues after the procurement of a plain white (oh yes, you read that right) painting for $100,000. Through artsUCL’s recent revival of Yasmina Reza's 1994 French-language play (directed by Tumo Reetsang and produced by Tom Hughes) audiences got to watch the devastating fallout between the friends unfold at the Bloomsbury Theatre.
Angelina Paz-King breathed life into the character of Serge: the white-on-white enthusiast who starts it all. King, as Serge, was a major source of comedy in the story’s opening scenes; it was near-impossible not to laugh at the pure blindness of this person who so clearly thinks of himself as a man of refined taste.
But only when the play progressed, and jibes among the friends turned into wounds, was the complexity behind Serge’s pretentious exterior laid bare. It turns out that, for Serge, this ridiculously plain — and ridiculously overpriced — painting represents his autonomy and self-worth. King captured Serge’s defensiveness and vulnerability with impressive nuance.
Enyu Hu played Marc, Serge’s highly-strung friend-turned-foe. The main objector to the painting, Marc loathes it from the moment he first lays eyes on it, and makes this hatred abundantly clear whenever possible (there was plenty to go around).
Hu delivered his lines with such conviction that if you squinted, you could almost certainly see steam coming out of his ears. He exuded controlled volatility.
As a viewer, I initially struggled to understand why Marc was so irked by Serge’s purchase. So what if Serge spent an exorbitant amount of money on a painting that my 10-year-old brother could recreate in five minutes? Why couldn’t Marc just accept it and move on? As tensions escalated, it became clear that Marc’s resentment was less about the painting and more about what he feared it revealed about him. Through Marc’s character, the play sheds light on the importance of loving our friends for who they are instead of the reflection of ourselves that they may provide.
Charlie Raven wrung every ounce of humour from the script as Yvan, the glue of the crew. Bursting with manic energy, it was impossible to look away whenever he was on stage.
One highlight for me was definitely Yvan’s breathless tirade about wedding invitations and stepmother politics in which his desperate need for approval is revealed. By breaking the invisible boundary between stage and audience, Raven transformed Yvan’s anxiety into something truly immersive. Yvan’s understated admission that he can tolerate the painting “if it makes him happy” reveals the play’s more generous vision of friendship in comparison to Marc’s.
The trio’s chemistry was palpable on stage; their back-and-forth exchanges, monologues, and even arguments were delivered so dynamically that it was not hard to believe them to be lifelong friends. Under Tumo Reetsang’s direction, the production struck a careful balance between biting humour and emotional vulnerability.
The production’s more technical choices did not go unnoticed. Classical interludes — most notably Vivaldi’s Four Seasons — added a layer of grandeur to the trio’s disputes. During monologues, strategic lighting isolated each character in turn, exposing the fragility beneath their posturing. Most strikingly, the faint sound of Marc’s heartbeat during moments of confrontation transformed his indignation into something palpably anxious.
Despite all the fuss over a white canvas, Bloomsbury Theatre’s revival of ‘ART’ leaves behind something far more colourful: a reminder that friendship, like art, is rarely about what we see, and more about what we choose to value.