★★★★☆
This feels a little bit like the theatrical equivalent of a reunion tour, like the Rolling Stones doing the rounds one more time but with better lighting. It was almost exactly 20 years ago — October 16, 1996, to be precise — that this play by Yasmina Reza about what happens when a man buys an expensive piece of modern art that baffles his two best friends had its first press night in London, having already wowed Paris.
Matthew Warchus, then 29, was the director and Benedict Nightingale, The Times’s critic, ended his review by saying: “This play strikes me as likely to become a minor classic.”
He was right, though as it went on to play for years in the West End and New York, that would be minor with a bit of major thrown in. Warchus, now artistic director of the Old Vic, has reassembled the old creative team. There’s the same voguish cream living room set by Mark Thompson, the vibraphone score by Gary Yershon, and brilliant lighting by Hugh Vanstone.
Only the actors — the original trio was Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney and Ken Stott — have been replaced.
Now it’s the twinkle-eyed Rufus Sewell who plays Serge, a middle-aged divorced dermatologist who has paid €100,000 for a painting of a white square with white lines on it. Paul Ritter plays Marc, his acerbic friend whose first reaction is to laugh and call it a piece of shit. The comedian Tim Key is Yvan, the one in the middle, the peacemaker who is having his own crisis as he prepares to get married and work in “stationery”, a job that he describes as having to get excited about expandable organiser files.
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Now, I am told that there are women in Britain who don’t fancy Rufus Sewell, but I am not sure that can be true. Needless to say he is appealing as Serge, a sexy but stubborn man who is convinced that the key to life can be grasped by reading Seneca (enough said).
Ritter makes a terrific bad guy: sardonic, superior, sneery, irritating but also funny. The man with the best lines, and the owner of one of the top rants ever seen on stage, is Key, the hen-pecked groom labelled at one point by Ritter as a spineless amoeba.
This play, which is 90 minutes straight through — a delightful length — isn’t about art as in the white square but the art of arguing (and the art of friendship).
There are moments, particularly with words such as “deconstructionism” on parade, when it does feel dated, but the essential issue — how can we get along when we don’t understand each other — feels absolutely spanking fresh.
Box office 0844 871 7628, to February 18