28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 Feb. - 6 March 2002 Issue No.575 |
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Art and artifice
Nehad Selaiha wonders if Yasmine Reza's Art, premiered in Egypt at the AUC, is not really about strategies for survival
It is often drummed into us that friends should be completely open with each other and always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. But how many friendships could actually survive this kind of uncompromising honesty? According to Yasmina Reza's international hit Art (first performed in Paris in 1995 and recently at the AUC) practically none. At the end of the play, when the storm whipped up by Serge's purchase of an absurdly expensive white- on-white painting -- which all but completely wrecks his 15-year friendship with Mark and Yvan -- finally subsides, and the three friends decide on a trial period "to try to rebuild a relationship destroyed by word and deed" (as Yvan reports) -- Serge confesses to the audience in a monologue that he has already launched the trial period with a lie. For how could he tell Mark, who intensely detests the painting, that when he allowed him (in the previous scene) to draw a skier on it with a felt-tip -- to show him that he cared more about him than it, or the 200,000 francs he paid for it -- that he knew all along that ink from felt-tips was washable? Serge's confession comes as a shock, a shattering revelation; what had seemed a heroic act of sacrifice (or madness, as Yvan calls it), an irrefutable proof of love, turns out to be nothing but a wise ruse, a cool, calculated deception.
Not that Mark deserves much sympathy; he shows none towards the follies and foibles of either of his two friends. In fact, there is a kind of poetic justice in what Serge does to him. Throughout he refuses to concede that mankind, as T S Eliot wisely noted, cannot bear too much reality and desperately needs little, pathetic illusions. And what are friends for if they do not support these illusions? Ironically, it turns out that, rather than either of his two friends, Mark is the one most in need of such a life support system. Though he is loath to admit it, his sense of self and human worth is completely dependent on seeing himself, his opinions and beliefs, and even the image he has of his own wife, Paula, reflected in his friends' eyes, particularly Serge's. When Serge goes and buys that white painting without consulting him, he feels cheated and viciously threatened: the blank canvas stares blankly at him, refusing to reflect back his image.
What he sees there is his own nullity. And even when Serge allows him to draw himself back onto the blankness, it is only a temporary reassurance: the solitary man he draws, gliding downhill on his skis, in the falling snow, under the white clouds and against the white glow of the earth, eventually disappears into the white landscape -- or, rather, he is removed "with the aid of Swiss soap with added ox gall." Though he starts off as a fierce mocker of deconstruction and postmodern art, Mark ends up savagely deconstructing everything, including himself, and seeing more in the painting he furiously despises than either Serge or Yvan pretend to do.
This deconstructive process, though tragic -- despite its brilliant comic façade (which explains why Reza was surprised when the play was classified as a comedy) -- is not, however, completely negative. As the solid friendship begins to disintegrate under the fierce gaze of the white painting -- as illusions thin out and evaporate and all the protective shields are ruthlessly stripped, the three men grow more real, more human, and, indeed, more sympathetic. They are forced to recognise that they have outgrown their youthful friendship, that their clinging to it is a fatuous attempt to shut out the reality of aging and the compromises it entails, and that, ultimately, when all illusions are stripped, we die alone -- solitary figures melting into a white landscape.
Curiously, too, the play draws a lot of positive comic energy from the absent female figures who are constantly dragged into the argument by the men to be demolished, caricatured, used as pegs to hang their frustrations on, or as weapons of attack. Despite the distortions they undergo in the process, they come across as vivid, quite real, and, however irritating, deeply reassuring. They firmly anchor the three hazy men into everyday reality. You wouldn't catch Yvan's mother or stepmother, his fiancée Catherine, her dead mother or stepmother, or, indeed, Mrs Romero -- Yvan's mother's cleaning woman -- wasting their time quarreling over a silly painting. Though absent and ruthlessly deconstructed by the three men, they are simply incapable of melting away in a white landscape like Mark's skier.
Catherine's mother, though dead, is very much there for Yvan: "The day after the wedding," he tells us, "at the Montparnasse cemetery, Catherine put her wedding bouquet and a little bag of sugared almonds on her mother's grave. I slipped away to cry behind a monument and in the evening, thinking again about this touching tribute, I started silently sobbing in my bed." Mark's wife, Paula, makes her presence felt in the homeopathic palliatives she gives her husband to reduce his tension and the feelings of panic and anxiety that accompany male mid-life crisis. She is also the one who comes to the rescue at the end and provides the recipe to remove the effects of her husband's and Serge's silly, adolescent prank. Serge's wife too, though less prominent than the other females in the play's background (she is alluded to only twice, and in a very cursory manner) is a key figure to understanding Serge. Her absence triggers many significant questions: why did she leave him? Did his relationship with Mark have anything to do with it? Why isn't she spoken off as freely as Mark's Paula or Yvan's females in the men's conversation? Are they afraid of her? Feeling guilty about her? And why did she suddenly insist, quite unlike her, as her husband says, on bringing him together with the children once a week at least, to his utter inconvenience? Was she trying to give him something more solid to hang on to as he slid, like Mark's skier, into the white landscape?
Teasingly, the play provides no answers and keeps us guessing afterwards; and this is where its real strength lies: in its gaps and blank spaces. It is often remarked by critics that Art is special because it eschews the all too conventional theme of the relationships of men and women. But does it?
As far as I can see, it represents how men act when women are not around to control their destructive (or de-constructive) impulses. And for this text to work in performance, the audience has to be made aware of its nebulous background. The alternately brutal and pitiful male actors have to evoke those absent characters as forcefully as they can and build them as a frame of reference within which their muddling can appear as both absurd, problematic and heart- rending. And this is what Frank Bradley (as Serge), Mahmoud El- Lozi (as Mark), and Karim Bishay (as Yvan) achieved. Bradley's Serge was at once cold, aloof, and thoroughly vulnerable -- at once like a man nursing a guilty secret, and a helpless child in the grip of a bully, digging in his heels and doing his best not to cry. Using minimal gestures and facial expressions, Bradley strongly evoked the terrible sense of emptiness underlying the life of the professionally successful, outwardly self-confident dermatologist he enacted. In his performance, Serge's purchase of the white painting is obliquely revealed as a metaphorical act of self-identification. El- Lozi's Mark was, for the most part, appropriately tempestuous, oppressive and thoroughly irritating -- altogether too much for anyone to cope with. But when he finally gets his way, or, rather, allows himself to be deceitfully reassured, he becomes like a little orphaned boy, beyond comforting, or like a man helplessly gazing into his own grave and you suddenly want to cry. Compared with him, and to Bradley's Serge, Bishay's Yvan seems luckier and much stronger. He manages to convince us, through his nervous, passionate outpourings, his vehement, emotional outbursts, his absent-minded tolerance of his friends' bickering unless he is forcibly dragged into it, and, above all, by his characteristic reed-in-the- wind-swaying body movement, that Yvan, though a clown and a failure (Mark calls him an "amoeba") has a better chance of survival than either of his too friends -- simply because he stares his own reality in the face without trying to camouflage it with talk of art, as they do. I knew that Bishay's Yvan had really got to me when I found myself remembering two lines from Yeats's Second Coming: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."
Brad Shelton's direction was smooth and muted, paying meticulous attention to the rhythm of the mood shifts as they flowed and ebbed and to the tempo of the dialogue. Rasha El-Gammal's set was simplicity itself and vastly eloquent. She structured the space into an L-shape, forming an empty corner, with two elegant, imposing walls -- forbiddingly bare -- stretching on both sides and dwarfing the actors. The only exits from this corner are two doors, one at the intersection of the two walls, leading backstage, and another, facing it, in a straight line, leading into the auditorium.
Significantly, the latter is used only by Yvan, while a glass-and-metal bar placed outside the former accentuates the idea of the corner into which the two other men are trapped. Jeanne Arnold's costumes, ranging from neutral beige and creme for Serge, brown and beige for Mark, and black and white for Yvan, acted like subtle psychological hints, while Hani Arman's lighting and Hazem Shebl's technical directing guaranteed the seamless flow of the action -- in and out of the characters and between their respective flats.
In the play's programme, Bradley "thanks Pam for the idea of doing Art." I do not know who Pam is; but I would like to hug her for the pleasure and many insights this production has given me and a lot of other people.
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