Chaos, Ego, and a White Canvas: Toby Schmitz on ART

Yasmina Reza’s Art has a deceptively simple premise: one man buys an expensive white painting, and his two oldest friends have feelings about it. What follows is a razor-sharp dismantling of ego, taste, and the quiet resentments that accumulate inside even the most durable friendships.

Since its Paris premiere in 1994, the play has proven almost impossible to resist — it has been translated into more than thirty languages, won both the Olivier Award for Best Comedy and the Tony Award for Best Play, and keeps finding new life in new productions because its central question refuses to date: how well do we really know the people we think we know best?

The latest iteration to capture audiences is this Australian production, which has been selling out theatres since it opened in Sydney in February, and is now mid-tour in Melbourne, with Adelaide still to come. The drawcard is formidable — Richard Roxburgh, Damon Herriman, and Toby Schmitz, three actors who between them have accumulated enough stage and screen credentials to fill a season’s worth of programs.

Schmitz plays Yvan, the third man in the trio — the one caught between two warring friends, trying to hold the peace while his own life quietly unravels. A Perth-born graduate of NIDA, Schmitz has spent more than two decades as one of Australian theatre’s most versatile presences, with a body of work spanning Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir, Griffin Theatre Company, and Bell Shakespeare. He has played Hamlet, Benedick, and Calico Jack Rackham in the international series Black Sails; he has written award-winning plays and, more recently, a novel. His Yvan — chaotic, tender, and in possession of a monologue that has stopped shows on this tour — is the kind of role that makes the most of everything he is.

Yvan is often described as the peacekeeper, the one caught in the middle — how do you find the balance between his chaos and need to smooth things over?

Toby: Chaos is the agreed upon natural state of the universe, by the sane. Most of us try to keep it at bay with ritual, hope, art, blinkers, holding our loved ones close. By a kind of smoothing. Being caught in the middle is arguably the funnest thing to be, as a storyteller. Being caught in the middle of Richard Roxburgh and Damon Herriman live on stage, two artists I’ve long found stonkingly riveting, entertaining, persuasive… that’s the stuff of boyhood dreams. Pin-balling in the moment with heroes. It’s a treat to play someone who has no agenda — to a comic and tragic degree —other than to hope everyone can just get along. No one’s going to just get along. Otherwise it aint a story. Or life, right? On one hand it’s an affable and generous objective, on the other pathetic and infuriating, a train-wreck of a modus operandi. It’s a quality we all at least relate to, excluding perhaps the psychopathic. Reactions to Yvan in the audience during the show and in the foyer swing giddily from sympathetic moans to dark barking glee when Yvan’s chums finally snap and eviscerate him for not having a genuine fucking opinion. On anything, other than the right not to have one. Fence-sitting is ultimately uncomfortable, inevitably disastrous, yet it’s what we’re all encouraged to do from birth in the name of civility and diplomacy. Shakespeare, and Chekhov, have myriad genius character studies of cats who pursue, for comic and dramatic effect, arguing both sides, into oblivion. It’s deliciously human, it’s brilliant, almost cruelly observed writing by Yasmina Reza, and in Hampton’s wicked translation, so as an actor, yeah, it’s like winning the lottery.

Art is fundamentally a play about what we can and can’t forgive in the people we love. Where do you personally land on that question after spending this much time inside it?

Toby: Is that an answerable question? Or simply our lot. Not trying to be clever, or evade, promise. I agree it’s a fundamental human conundrum, thus good drama. I’m humbled and drawn like a magnet to those stricken family members, required to support someone who has done something horrible enough to be on trial for incarceration, for social punishment. Observe those people in the courtroom like Helen Garner does. The collateral human toll. Their public stoicism, heartache. What does it take to give up on someone? At what cost? That is the question. The great tales ask this sort of searing question of us. How do you break up with an old friend? After the why, and the how, the next question is can it be done at all? And then, in a play like this, might it also be very, very funny?

What’s the painting actually like to be on stage with every night?

Toby: What a fabulous question. After two days rehearsals with it — and let us be clear, it’s a five foot by four white canvas — I started to not only see things in it, but ask who gets to keep it when the show is over. (We’re going to auction it.) My character says at one point: ‘The more I see it the more I like it, honestly.’ It makes me ponder what narratives we instinctually imbue negative space with, be it reading between the lines in daily dialogue, fear of, or meditating in, silence, seeing the potential of a vacant lot amongst skyscrapers. The electric joy is that the audience starts to have their own relationship with this white, blank piece of art. Having a painting on stage has a long theatrical tradition. It’s a Mousetrap within a play. Our species has adapted to find meaning in objects, and also in the absence of them, it’s what raises us above trout. (I take that back, trout may have wild inner lives I am not qualified to weigh in on.)

The three of you are directed by Lee Lewis — who also directed you in Gaslight.  How does a returning creative relationship affect the work? Is there a shorthand that develops, or do you try to keep the instincts fresh?

Toby: It’s totally both. The shorthand is a hard won latitude, as in any profession, while maintaining the courage to keep fresh ideas coming is vital to live storytelling. Everyone, especially the audience, wants to sense they are witnessing something that’s never happened before, yeah? Lee cares about actors, I discern she really likes them, and I suspect she trod the boards at some nascent point. These are by no means ubiquitous qualities in directors. The greatest trait, I have slowly learned, in theatre directors, is when and how not to say something. It takes moxie and discipline. At some point, if you are fortuned, plain lucky, you might reunite with theatre rats of quality, and this homecoming, married with a completely new story… it’s a kind of indescribable blessing.

There’s a real sense that audiences are coming to this show to see you three as much as the play itself. Does that feel like pressure, or is it liberating to walk into a room where the goodwill is already there?

Toby: Utterly the latter. I mean, I’d come and see it for that reason, even out of envy, if I could afford to. I feel that real sense, too, and I choose to believe it’s wonderful happenstance over spin. Goodwill aint the same as good advertising. The three of us have earned this, dare I say, money-for-jam, shoo-in vibe, for precisely the same reason we refuse to rest on any laurels, and take not a moment for granted. The pressure is to reinvent the story anew every moment, every show, that’s the engine, the reason one commits to live storytelling. Occasionally, in the snap blackout before the curtain call, Rox says quietly out the side of his mouth: ‘Well done, lads.’ Like some WWII RAAF Squadron Leader. That’s as cool as it gets. It might be of interest to know that the three of us regularly thank the fates, in our own ways, for allowing us to have this moment in time together; such confluences of art, commerce and dopamine don’t just happen because you want it to. Personally, it’s one for the memoirs.

Art was written in the ‘90s but keeps getting revived. What do you think it’s hitting on right now that makes it feel so timely — or do you think it’s just genuinely, permanently true?

Toby: It’s an instant classic, performed in many languages, non-stop for thirty years, for a reason. Reza crafted a gem, with gleaming new facets depending on how you turn it, cleverly built for different actors, different interpretations. The clue’s in the title. Like all the best stories, it’s a cracking yarn, which at some point — maybe in the car on the way home, or the next morning — you realise, might be about everything.

Ninety minutes, no interval — is that a gift or a test?

Toby: Suck it and see, baby. The play’s the thing.

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Art is playing now at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne.

For tickets and more information, visit arttheplay.com.au

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Header photo by Brett Boardman