Why ART still stings, sparkles and lands 30 years on

Some plays arrive, make a splash and fade. Others burrow deeper into theatre culture and refuse to leave. ART, Yasmina Reza’s internationally celebrated three-hander about friendship, taste and the detonating power of one very expensive painting, belongs firmly in the second category.

Now the award-winning modern classic is heading to Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre from April 22, with a heavyweight cast of Richard Roxburgh (Rake, The Correspondent, Elvis), Damon Herriman (Better Man, Mr Inbetween, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and Toby Schmitz (Boy Swallows Universe, Gaslight, Grief is the Thing with Feathers), in what feels less like a routine revival than a reminder of how satisfying a sharply written adult comedy can be when it is handed to actors who know exactly what to do with it.

Directed by Lee Lewis, the production opens with a famously simple premise: one friend buys an extremely expensive white painting, another cannot believe he has done it, and an argument that begins over art quickly becomes something much larger; about taste, ego, honesty and the fault lines of long-term friendship.

For Schmitz, the relationship with the play goes back nearly 30 years.

“I came to the script in the late ‘90s,” he told CBD News. “By the time I got to it in 1997, someone had a copy of it, like a printed-out, beaten-up copy that was passed around, I remember. And we all just loved it.”

Even then, he said, the appeal was immediate. Though he and his friends were far too young for the play’s middle-aged male roles, they were drawn to it anyway.

It’s such a cracking bit of writing, Schmitz said. A lot of me and my chums learnt some of the monologues and did scenes at drama school in the late ‘90s because it’s just such a fun, and at times a moving, bit of writing.

That instinct has proved accurate. ART has never really gone away. Since premiering in the 1990s, it has been revived again and again around the world, and for Schmitz that endurance says something important.

“It’s always been revived somewhere because it was sort of an instant classic. Yasmina Reza just wrote a jewel,” he said.

Part of that comes down to the sheer precision of the writing. Schmitz, who started in stand-up and knows stage comedy intimately, spoke with admiration about the mechanics embedded in the script.

“I’m very aware just even looking at the page of the setups, the repeated gags, the misdirection, all the real technical stuff,” he said. “But it’s right there in the text.”

Performing it now has only reinforced that view. He said the production had been drawing “waves of rolling laughter”, often at exactly the same moments each night, which was one of the clearest signs that the play’s comic engine was doing its job.

But ART lasts because it is not just funny. Beneath the laughter sits a more uncomfortable question about intimacy and truth: how honest should we really be with the people we love?

It is a deceptively ordinary question, but one that opens into rich territory. What do you say when a friend introduces you to a partner you secretly dislike? How honest are you when the thing being judged is no longer hypothetical, but already chosen, bought and lived with? That is where ART moves beyond satire and into something more lasting and recognisable.

In Schmitz’s reading, the play is not only about modern art or even male friendship. It is also about the performance involved in everyday life: the different selves we present depending on who is in the room.

“We’re all actors,” he said. “We all talk to our mum differently than we talk to the tradie who comes to fix the plumbing.”

That idea gives the play much of its bite. Radical honesty sounds noble in theory, but in practice it can be destabilising, even destructive. Reza’s script teases out the tension between affection and frankness, loyalty and self-expression, and the little social fictions that often keep friendships intact.

The chemistry between Schmitz, Roxburgh and Herriman also seems central to this production. Schmitz said rehearsal began, as it should, with the text, but quickly deepened once the three actors started properly playing off one another.

“Once you look up from the page and look into the eyes of someone else who has genuinely funny bones, then the experience explodes exponentially,” he said.

He described both Roxburgh and Herriman as actors with “wicked comic timing”, and said there was already a familiarity there that helped. In a play like ART, where so much depends on rhythm, reaction and tiny changes in emotional temperature, that shorthand matters.

And while the play is rightly sold as a razor-sharp comedy, Schmitz is clear that the humour only works because the emotional stakes are real.

“I think that great comedy has to pass through a bedrock of tragedy,” he said.

That duality is part of what keeps the play feeling fresh. It also shapes the audience response. Schmitz described a point in each performance where the room seems to realise, with delight, that the play is going to keep delivering.

“The quality of the laughter changes suddenly to a really sort of open, relaxed, free-for-all of giggling and shrieking,” he said.

At a time when theatre is often sold through urgency, spectacle or prestige, ART offers something more direct: a tightly wound, 90-minute, no-interval play that is smart, funny and built for adults.

Schmitz hinted that this kind of out-and-out comedy has become rarer than it should be.

“I hope people are still thinking, ‘Why haven’t I seen such an outrageously entertaining show like that for so long?’” he said.

ART features at the Comedy Theatre from April 22 to May 3.

arttheplay.com.au •