Art, at the Old Vic in London, is a play about art and friendship, but mostly about friendship. Don’t let the 5ft by 4ft white canvas with white stripes on a white background – the “art” of the play – distract you. The play focuses on the friendship between three men, Serge (Rufus Sewell), a divorced dermatologist; Marc (Paul Ritter), an engineer and Serge’s long-standing friend and mentor; and Yvan (Tim Key), a somewhat downtrodden stationer about to get married.
The art itself is a modernist canvas circa the 1970s bought by Serge, played superbly by Sewell with the smugness and irritation one might expect of someone who’s just splashed out €100,000 on a piece of art. Marc, whom Ritter makes wonderfully gregarious, calls the art “a piece of white s---”.
