Saint Nicholas & Art
Wren, Celia
II ~ t is hard, it is hard indeed," a bored theater critic intones in Tom Stoppard's comic masterpiece The Real Inspector Hound, "and therefore I will not attempt, to refrain from invoking...
...The irascible Marc (Alan Alda) thinks it is a joke...
...Launched on the road to international success when Sean Connery's wife saw it in Paris in 1995, Art was recently a hit in London under the direction of Matthew Warchus, who is also responsible for the stylish, perfectly paced New York production...
...not surprisingly, the monologue merges incommensurates with oneiric nonchalance...
...McPherson even hints at how easy it is for critical pedantry to eclipse real understanding: a surefire way to escape vampires, it turns out, is to fling a few handfuls of rice at them...
...He was recently sighted in the films The Boxer and Desperate Measures...
...But lopsided stories can have more charm - - and even, in a way, more solidity-- than narratives with Tiffany contours...
...The set's stark, unnaturally high walls, dwarfing the actors, flavor the scenes with absurdism reminiscent of a New Yorker cartoon...
...Never self-sufficient, they revel in their ability to instill fear...
...esthetic verdicts wreak yet more havoc in Art, the brilliant comedy by French playwright Reza...
...Does an art work have inherent value, or is value created by the market, or the era---or by a spectator's caprice...
...Is there such a thing as disinterested friendship...
...II ~ t is hard, it is hard indeed," a bored theater critic intones in Tom Stoppard's comic masterpiece The Real Inspector Hound, "and therefore I will not attempt, to refrain from invoking the names of Kafka, Sartre, Shakespeare, Saint Paul, Beckett, Birkett, Pinero, Pirandello, Dante, and Dorothy L. Sayers...
...Apart from a few chairs and milkcrates, the production (directed by McPherson) boasted no set, but the actor moved as if a tangible past surrounded him: a bar packed with wary actors, or dawn-struck vampires melting from a garden littered with bodies...
...Three contrasting chairs--one hyper-modern, one antique, and one somewhere in-between--serve as both furniture and symbol...
...Wait a minute...
...Conor McPherson's leisurely and enigmatic Saint Nicholas develops organically around a few evocative images...
...Are modern artists trying to pull one over on us...
...This set represents the apartment of each of the three friends in turn, with alterations of lighting and the substitution of a single painting making it echo the personality of each I/ mel t is unseemly to take pleasure in the failures of others, but there is reason to do so in the news that the New Yorker magazine of Tina Brown and S.I...
...Shortly after firing this salvo of allusions at the derivative potboiler he is watching, the reviewer finds himself swept helplessly across the footlights, to his doom...
...It is hard to know which aspect of Art to admire more: the concept, or the exCommonweal | 5 May 8, 1998 ecution...
...Reza has balanced ninety minutes of human and intellectual insight onto a witty premise: three men--devoted friends for years--find their relationship crumbling after one of them buys a white-on-white painting...
...Capitalizing masterfully upon this conceit, Reza probes the ambiguities of art and affection in scenes that are taut, ingeniously structured, and often hilarious...
...From a character study anchored in Dublin's theater district, whence the inexplicable detour through Anne Rice territory...
...The English translation is by playwright/screenwriter/director Christopher Hampton...
...And is there any delicate way of disposing of olive pits...
...Cox has a supremely confident stage presence: at one press preview, he delivered a minute or two of the monologue while perched calmly on the armrest of a scribbling reviewer...
...The artistic authority he exuded underscored one theme linking Saint Nicholas's vampires to its thespians: the relationship between opinion and power...
...and its circulation and profits were in slow decline, but it still was the country's best and most influential magazine...
...Professional critics are vampires, the play suggests: they prey on creativity, and grow stronger by sapping artists' strength...
...Profundities skim by like ping pong balls...
...could admit them to a deconstructionists' convention...
...From the opening moments, when Alda peers at Serge's painting, tilts his head, takes off his glasses, steps back, and peers again, expertly-tuned performances by the three stars keep the intellectual debate churning beneath histrionics and deadpan comedy...
...Its decline, in my view (as a contributor from 1971 to 1985) was due chiefly to its having become an anachronism in an American society greatly changed not only from 1925, when the magazine was founded, but from the 1940s and 1950s when it had found a new voice and authority under the influence of William Shawn, who became editor after the magazine's creator, Harold Ross, died in 1951...
...Yvan (Alfred Molina), always a moderate, comes down in the middle, to the fury of the other two...
...Even the actors' matching costumes-blue shirts and ties beneath black suits, for example - - subtly undermine the realism...
...Commonweal | 6 May 8, 1998...
...The protagonist of the one-man play Saint Nicholas is, in fact, a theater critic, a world-weary alcoholic whose enthusiasm for show business is less substantial than the foam on his beer...
...Indeed, the production is a testament to the way set, lighting, costume, acting, and direction can work together to turn a script to best account...
...Smitten with an actress in a mediocre production, he forsakes career and family, follows the lady to London, and, as one might expect, falls in with a crowd of...vampires...
...The brooding Serge (Victor Garber) thinks the painting is brilliant...
...But both works comment incisively on the experience of being a critic--not a professional phrasemonger, necessarily, but anyone who wields an artistic opinion in the face of a hostile or indifferent world...
...The dialogue has the paradoxical versatility of an optical illusion: Serge, Marc, and Yvan criticize each other by criticizing art, and each betrays himself when attacking the other guy...
...Perfect shape smacks of insincerity, while a straggling plot invites belief, since it can have no other justification but truth...
...And if any actor can tempt us to swallow McPherson's concept, it is Cox, a craggy, mesmerizing actor whose voice is so thrilling he could transfix listeners by reciting the ingredients on an aspirin bottle...
...Lovers of form will scorn the work for its dreamlike shapelessness...
...It has been losing money ever since Newhouse bought the magazine thirteen years ago, and now it is to be folded into the operations of Newhouse's other fashion and celebrity magazines...
...Mark Thompson's stylized design gives the visual composition a tinge of antinaturalism...
...Savoring the lines, delivering phrases with idiosyncratic but perfectly chosen shifts in speed, Cox dared the audience to doubt he was the wayward Dublin critic...
...Compulsive connoisseurs of detail, the vampires (critics) will be glued to the spot, oblivious to the broader landscape, until they have counted every last grain...
...The New Yorker was profitable when the Fleischmann family sold it in 1985...
...As Serge, Marc, and Yvan sputter over the tenets of art, the production calls attention to the fact that they themselves are fabrications...
...As the trio lurches ever closer to violence, the canvas becomes a window onto aesthetic, linguistic, and emotional abysses...
...After years of churning out withering commentaries, this decaying Dublin hack (Brian Cox) feels both torment and relief when a play--or, more accurately, a player--finally makes an impression...
...Reza gauges the temperaments of her characters with a surgeon's precision, and the script's ever-changing currents of anger, resentment, and sympathy create astonishing suspense in a play that is basically one long discussion...
...It had become somewhat predictable man...
...How about absolute truth...
...Three decades after Stoppard sentenced his critic to death by drama, two delightful new plays from across the Atlantic have picked up on the theme of aesthetic peril...
...Up-and-coming Irish playwright McPherson has acknowledged that the idea for Saint Nicholas came to him in a dream...
...And their quibbles over words and concepts (Is it the white in the painting, or the idea of whiteness, that is so upsetting...
...Newhouse, Jr., is a failure...
...Think twice before announcing your critiques, it seems to warn the audience: you may yourselves embellish some tableau whose features you cannot perceive...
...Criticizing art is a dangerous business...
...Yasmina Reza's Art is cerebral and tightly woven, an inspired construct of ideas and banter...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 9
