ART: The Comedy About Three Men Who Have Never Once Talked About Their Feelings

This review took me a little while to write.

Not because I didn't know what I thought; I knew from the moment I walked out of the Comedy Theatre. It was more that Art sits with you in a specific and mildly unsettling way. Like catching your reflection doing something you didn't realise you were doing. I stood outside the Comedy Theatre afterwards and did that thing men do where you don't quite articulate what just happened and instead talk vaguely about dinner, but this time I was processing.

Art has a way of doing that to you.

Art, written in 1994 by French playwright Yasmina Reza and now, some thirty-plus years later, making its first proper Australian tour, arrives looking like a play about a painting. It is not a play about a painting. It is a play about three men and the architecture of their friendship. And it was written by a woman, which, as it turns out, is the precise reason it is this accurate, funny, moving and brilliant.

Reza's insight into the world of male friendship is something specific and extraordinary. She sees both the surface ease and the staggering, load-bearing complexity operating simultaneously beneath it. The silences. The thing said through the thing conspicuously not said. The argument that is never about what it is supposedly about. What she has distilled into ninety uninterrupted minutes is something most men have never found the language for. Most still won't, even after watching it. Many will prefer to talk about dinner instead.

The premise is beautifully minimal. Serge, a successful dermatologist, buys a large, expensive, predominantly white painting. His close friend Marc considers this an act of profound stupidity. Their mutual friend Yvan is caught in the middle, which is, more or less, where Yvan has always lived. What follows is three men using an art canvas as a proxy for decades of unspoken grievances, shifting power, unexpressed care, and the particular terror of watching someone you've known your entire adult life become someone you no longer fully recognise.

You will recognise all three of them. Not as a metaphor. Genuinely.

The Australian production directed with pinpoint precision by Lee Lewis, who holds an OAM for her decades of contribution to Australian theatre, is impeccably cast. And I mean that as specifically as possible: not just talented, but right. Richard Roxburgh as Marc brings a controlled, coiled intensity, the man in every social group who sets the tone, who decides what's acceptable and what isn't, and who experiences another person's independent growth as something faintly personal and threatening. Damon Herriman as Serge carries the quiet defiance of a man who has, for possibly the first time, done something entirely on his own terms. And Toby Schmitz as Yvan is, I say this with genuine admiration, the most recognisable man on the Australian stage right now.

The chemistry between these three is not manufactured. It breathes. It has weight. And if you want a genuine masterclass in theatrical craft, that is the craft that lives in specifics rather than gestures, in the small rather than the broad, then pay very close attention to the scenes involving the olives and the cashews. You'll know when you get there. Watch everything. Nothing in this production is accidental.

Charles Davis's set design does characterisation before anyone speaks. Three rooms, three men, three distinct relationships to the worlds they've built for themselves. Lee Lewis has staged all of this with the confidence of someone who knows she doesn't need to show you the architecture. You feel it instead. The whole thing is load-bearing.

The French were having this conversation in 1994. It would appear we are, with some delay, catching up.

What makes Art a rare and enduring thing is precisely what it does by virtue of who wrote it. Reza sees men the way men rarely write themselves. Not heroically, not pathetically, but precisely. Despite its depth, this is a properly funny play. And alongside the comedy, with the particular accuracy of someone who has studied these dynamics from the outside, and seen what the men inside them have learned not to notice.

I looked around the Comedy Theatre on the night I attended and noticed something I wasn't quite prepared for. There were a lot of women, partners, sisters, wives, mothers who had clearly brought the men beside them to this show with deliberate, quiet intent. I don't know what conversations happened on the way home. I hope they happened. I suspect some did.

Art doesn't lecture about masculinity. It doesn't adjudicate. It puts three men on a stage, at close range, under good lighting, and simply says: here they are. Have a look. Maybe talk about it, honestly.

I'll admit the content of this play is close to home in more than one direction. At different points in my life, and I'd argue at different points within a single week, I have been all three of these men. I think if you're honest with yourself, you might have been too. And I think if you see this show, you'll come out into the night and, for a moment, talk about something other than dinner, and you should.

The play will have already done its work either way.

Art plays the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, until this Sunday. Adelaide follows at Her Majesty's Theatre, 20–24 May. Go.

Tickets from Art The Play

Full cast and crew listing

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