Review: ART at Baxter Flipside

Art is subjective, and Yasmina Reza’s ART (translated by Christopher Hampton) suggests that people are too. How much of a friendship rests on what we think the other person is, and how quickly can that unravel when they turn out to be someone else entirely?

In this play, the person in question is Serge, who has spent a small fortune on a painting that is, as far as his old friend Marc can tell, entirely white. Marc’s contempt for the purchase, and for what it says about who Serge has become, sets off an explosive argument between the pair, with Ivan, ever the peacemaker, caught in the crossfire.

Marthinus Basson, doing double duty as director and designer, builds the production around this instability. A white sheet on the floor stands in for the room, hemming the actors into the space and denying them any easy exit when the conversation turns confrontational: there’s nowhere to flee to, so they have to have it out. It’s a neat echo of the ‘blank’ canvas causing all the trouble in the first place. The furniture works just as hard, despite never moving. The characters’ very different use of the same pieces tells us whose living room we’re in while also physicalising their discomfort in each other’s space. Ivan’s inability to sit upright on Serge’s chairs says as much about his spinelessness in the face of his friends’ aggression as anything he says aloud.

Lighting designer Nicholaas de Jongh uses precisely placed spotlights to let each man step outside the scene into his own head, and the actors handle the switches between dialogue and direct address with real assurance. Reza’s fondness for pointed, specific props is well served too: Ivan’s wayward pen lid, the pen itself, the cashews and olives, to say nothing of the painting at the centre of it all, do quiet character work of their own.

The three performances lean into each other with the fast, complicated give-and-take the play demands. Wilhelm van der Walt’s Ivan is a joy. His comic timing and physicality make the go-between’s exasperation and eagerness to please delightfully hilarious without tipping into farce. Wessel Pretorius’s increasingly apoplectic Marc plays off Ludwig Binge’s controlled, haughty Serge to terrific comic effect, the two of them ratcheting each other up while Van der Walt scrambles to keep the peace.

What emerges is a realistic, if heightened, portrait of an old friendship. But the accumulated history, old wounds, inside jokes and quirks that come with decades of knowing someone have quietly shifted without anyone noticing, and now that shift is suddenly and undeniably visible to everyone, characters and audience alike. Reza’s knack is using ridiculousness and humour to sneak up on genuinely difficult truths about how people relate to one another, and this production’s director, designer and cast clearly understand exactly what she’s doing and lean into it artfully.

Because underneath the laughs, ART is asking something uncomfortable: how much of who we are depends on what other people think of us, or more precisely, what we think they think of us? Are personhood and relationships, in the end, as subjective as art?

Well, that’s what I thought, but go and see for yourself. Art is, after all, subjective.

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