THEATRE REVIEW: ART
20 Mar'10

'Art' has value

JOHN COULBOURN -QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

She called it ART but she could as easily have titled it Value, for Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed and thought-provoking stage play is as much about the price we put on everything from paintings to friendship, as it is about the art we hang on our walls.

After an acclaimed Canadian premiere more than a decade ago, ART returned to the Canadian stage in a production by Canadian Stage that opened Thursday in the Bluma Appel theatre.

It is still an appealing play and this, in many ways, is an appealing production with Peter Donaldson, Colin Mochrie and Evan Buliung essaying the roles of three men whose 15-year-friendship is almost torn apart when one of them buys a controversial piece of modern art — specifically a white-on-white canvas that at least one of his friends sees as nothing less than a personal affront.

Mochrie is cast as Serge, the upwardly-mobile dermatologist whose purchase precipitates the crisis, while Donaldson plays Marc, the friend who dismisses Serge’s foray into fine art and collecting as nothing more than “a piece of s---.”
Buliung, meanwhile, tackles the role of Yvan, the frazzled peacekeeper in their midst, more concerned with juggling the demands placed on him by his prospective bride, her family, his family, his employer and his friends than with the minor disparity in those friends’ tastes in art.

But when the discussion moves from a minor into a major key, Yvan becomes collateral damage as both Marc and Serge pull out the big guns and finally gamble their very friendship in order to defend their divergent points of view.

Translated from French to English by Christopher Hampton, the script retains a lingering Gaelic flavour that in the wrong hands could seem almost stilted — a problem exacerbated here by director Morris Panych’s and designer Ken MacDonald’s decision to firmly anchor the story in Paris, its locale underscored by intrusive bits of video projection that show us Paris streetscapes in addition to closeups of the three principals that are far from flattering. Apparently, nose hair is funny this year.

It also serves to underline the fact that of the three actors on stage, only Buliung marshals up sufficient “Je ne sais quoi” to make us believe he is French.

Panych and MacDonald also conspire from the get-go to put the emphasis of their production more on the nature of friendship than on the nature of art, presenting us not with a painting but with a blank canvas that — while it may invite us to project our own artistic vision upon it — seems to echo everything negative Marc has to say about it, rendering Serge little more than a poseur in the process.

It’s a device that, at least at Thursday’s opening, seemed to ratchet up the comedic aspects of Reza’s script, even while it downplayed the importance of the dialogue it offers on the role of art in our lives. As he so often does, Panych as a director chooses to lead with the comedy, rather than let it grow organically from the tale he is telling.

When it comes down to choosing style over substance, it seems this is one director that will back style every time, ensuring that his audience sees Reza’s characters as buffoons and their besieged friendship as something of very little value. The apparent destruction of the painting draws gasps, the apparent dissolution of the friendship, little more than laughter. As works of Art go, Panych has a firm grasp on form but, as usual, he proves more than a trifle weak when it comes to depth.