Writer: Yasmina Reza
Dramaturg: Sam Smithson
Yasmina Reza’s 1994 comedy of manners, Art, established the writer’s signature style: mostly unlikable characters whose veneer of middle-class civility rapidly spirals into domestic chaos, leaving a more-or-less cathartic landscape of emotional wreckage in its wake.
The play saw a high-profile Broadway revival in late 2025, with James Corden heading a stellar cast, so it is no surprise to see producers eyeing up a London outing. Dramaturg Sam Smithson – the show blurb does not list a director – serves up a pared-back 75-minute production of the piece that, though gifted with three quality performances, struggles to feel as funny as it should.
Wealthy, social-climbing dermatologist Serge (Harry Dillon) seeks validation by entering the world of elite art collecting. He spends 200,000 Francs on a fashionable painting that is entirely white, save for a few slanting crosswise lines that may or may not contain shades of grey. Serge’s former mentor and now friend of 15 years, cynical aeronautical engineer Marc (Dan Daniels), thinks, with some justification, that the purchase is “shit”. What begins as a debate over the meaning of art and the value, or otherwise, of modernism escalates into conflict over each man’s core values and sense of self. The painting becomes a cypher for their inability to find a connection. Can their friendship survive? “I can’t love the Serge who’s capable of buying that”, Marc insists, so don’t bet on it.
Enter Yvan (Tom Terry), a persistent people-pleaser, stressed about his upcoming wedding and a lacklustre career in the stationery trade: “I’m groping my way into the world of vellum”, he wails. Yvan, who, we hear, “doesn’t really know what happiness is”, tries to play the peacemaker, claiming to find “a resonance” in the painting, but ends up caught anyway in the crossfire.
As the three intellectualise over the painting’s worth and meaning, their relationships unravel, revealing deep-seated resentments, insecurities, and, for one, an unforeseen proclivity to violence. Tension reaches a breaking point when Serge, in an act of either self-sacrifice or calculated emotional manipulation, hands Marc a blue felt-tip pen and dares him to deface the immaculate white canvas.
Satirising the anxieties of the French middle class threatens tedium, and it has to be said, Reza does it to rather greater comic effect in God of Carnage, decently revived not too long ago at the Lyric Hammersmith. What caustic comedy there is in Art feels oddly underplayed here: it is as if the production is a little in awe of the play’s intellectual underpinning. “Everyone has lost their sense of humour”, one character says, and one cannot help agreeing.
Things perk up in a decently delivered scene in which Terry’s Yvan suffers a meltdown over wedding invitations and a cohort of squabbling stepmothers. Daniels’ grumpy, self-satisfied, atrophied Marc neatly captures the raw, bewildered anger beneath his character’s seemingly rational dismissal of contemporary fashions. Dillon is good, too, as the pompous, needy Serge, who seems to truly believe that “modern is the highest compliment you can give”. Despite the quality performances, this production feels a little hard-going at times.
Runs until 14 March 2026
