Local cast reunite for second run of audience favourite

Eilís Ryan

Three Mullingar actors are to revive their production of a play that proved a big hit with audiences last year.

Daniel Egerton, Conor Walsh and Sam Gilmartin are to stage Art by Yasmina Reza at Mullingar Arts Centre in the second week of April. They last staged the comedy in October of last year.

“The play is basically centred around three friends – they’ve been friends for years – and one of them starts to become quite wealthy through his career and he buys a very expensive piece of modern art,” Daniel says, going on to explain that the piece or art in question, which cost more than €200,000, is “just a white square with three off-white flashes going across it”.

That sets the scene for an examination of the relationship between the three guys.

“So my character, Mark, looks at his friend Serge (played by Conor), who bought the painting, as he says, ‘this is not like you’.

He doesn’t respect modern art.

And they have these conversations throughout the play about art and what art actually is and what it means, how him buying the painting represents a change in him, how he’s doing it for social class reasons rather than because he actually respects it as a piece of art, and what the painting actually represents.

“And the other character, Anto (Sam Gilmartin), is going through a stressful wedding preparation. He plays the go-between between the two guys and he’s saying one thing to one of the characters and then saying another thing to the other.”

The main action of the play revolves around an occasion when the three are getting ready to head out for an evening, having not seen each other in a while – but the subject of the painting comes up, and the little lies they have told each other about the work start falling apart.

“And so it builds up into this thing where their whole relationship comes to the forefront and then it starts crashing down around them. They start peeling back the layers of lies and platitudes that they have given each other over the course of years,” says Daniel.

The upshot is that their relationship implodes that night.

Originally written in French and set in Paris, the play ran for several years in a West End theatre.

“We’ve electrified it a little bit. We added a bit more, I like to say punk rock energy, to it and we’ve set it in Dublin.

“But where it’s set is meaningless. It’s about class and relationships between three guys and the fact that they’re not able to communicate.”

The play is being directed by Seán Lynch, and was almost a surprise hit: “We were just doing this little play to have the craic with it. And then it ended up selling out. It got great reviews from the town and people are constantly asking us ‘when are you bringing it back?’.”

Some of those who attended last year came to the three nights of the show: “We had standing ovations every night.

And it’s a short play as well: it’s only about an hour and 20 minutes, no interval. So we carry the energy straight through.

“But I remember we were so nervous about it because we were doing other projects at the same time.

We’d just been to Electric Picnic the weekend before. So we were all fairly wrecked after that.

“And so we come into our rehearsal week and we were just sweating it because we didn’t know what the ticket sales were like. Sean wasn’t telling us, which usually means a bad thing, but it ended up being quite a good thing.

The last night we had to put out extra seats. It went really well.”

The guys enjoy performing together: “We’ve been doing shows together since we were kids,” says Daniel.

• The play runs for two nights, Friday April 17 and Saturday April 18, and tickets fan be booked via the arts centre box office, 9347777.