My most enduring memory of the late 1990s (yes, I'm really this sad) is going up and down tube escalators in London en route to work, and constantly passing the posters for Art at Wyndham's Theatre. The poster featured the three characters in the play, and it seemed like every time I glided past it, the actors changed. George Wendt, Nigel Havers, Warren Mitchell, Albert Finney. Over the many years of its run, Art became a who's who of the acting elite of the late 20th century. The final cast was the League of Gentlemen team. And, to my eternal regret, I never went to see it. So what a relief finally to put that right. But was it worth the wait?
Art, in case you don't know, is the French play with the big white painting. Conceptual-art-lover Serge has bought this ostensibly blank canvas for 200,000 francs (that's about £25,000). His friend Marc is incredulous and describes the painting as 'shit'. And Yvan can't decide. Torn between his two friends, he's forced reluctantly into the role of peacekeeper and ends up being ripped to pieces by both of them.
Yasmina Reza's play (translated by Christopher Hampton) came out at a time when the British public were genuinely at loggerheads over whether things were art or not. Tracy Emin had just caused a sensation with her unmade bed. Damien Hirst was the darling of the cognoscenti and the bête noir of the traditionalists with his formaldehyde half-cows. And Carl Andre's 'Pile of Bricks', even though it was by then twenty years old, was still known more for the hoo-ha it caused than its inherent artistic significance.
Things have moved on. Emin and Hirst are now elder statesfigures on the British culture scene, and a plain white canvas would nowadays be criticised more for its unoriginality than its inadmissibility as art. The debate fuelling Reza's play feels dated.
But the principles behind that debate remain as real as ever: irony versus sincerity; value versus cost; honesty versus deception. Art is not really about the painting at all, but about the test of love and friendship that it causes. And Reza's play itself is as divisive as that white rectangle at its heart: is it witty entertainment or serious social satire? A critique of masculinity or a celebration of homosexuality? The Emperor's New Clothes or The Inbetweeners? The brilliance and the annoyance of it is that, surprise surprise, it's all these things at once. It's so cultured, so knowing, so bloody French, that, as a script, it disappears up its own mise en scene.
Of course one thing that never occurred to anyone in the 1990s was that these three oh-so-male protagonists, respectively divorced, married and engaged, might actually be gay. But that is what Theo Joly's and Oli Spooner's production offers as an explanation for their passionately platonic tirades. The references to their wives and fiancées are spat out with unmistakable disgust, and Marc treats Serge's painting more as a rival than a purchase. In this interpretation that blank white space doesn't look like a pretentious statement but rather an open doorway, inviting these men, who may never have expressed their true feelings before, to come clean about their affections. Marc, in rejecting the painting, is the last to accept the truth about himself. Art is love. And what could be more French than that? Never have I felt more like shouting out, 'Fetchez une chambre!'
Whether this reading was in Reza's mind I'm not sure, but it's a testament to the adaptability of her creation that a new generation can find a relevant angle into a thirty-year-old text.
One of the reasons Art starred so many of our leading actors back in the day was that it demands (and rewards) performances of the highest calibre. Subtlety, passion, and the ability to make an audience collapse in mirth with the merest tweak of an eyebrow are the sort of skills that Tom Courtenay, Mark Gatiss and Roger Lloyd-Pack honed over decades. It's impossible to expect university students to emulate that level of mastery, but Rufus Shutter, Jem Hunter and Ronav Jain give it their all. Hunter exudes truculent connoisseurship, Shutter personifies frustrated ignorance, and Jain panics like a frightened rabbit. Together, they generate a febrile sense of thwarted longing, and their indignation at each other's behaviour rings true. Where they don't quite succeed is in bringing us the highs and lows of these characters. The mood is somewhat one-paced and as a result it sometimes feels as though the same battles are being rehearsed again and again. The arguments spin around, but they don't seem to progress.
Nevertheless, this is an intense, focused hundred minutes of theatre about identity, honesty and allegiance. But is it art? Yes.