Comedy, down to a fine 'Art'

JUST under two years old, Mandarin theatre company Nine Years Theatre is on a roll - translating and staging classic works such as Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men to spectacular success.

Its latest production of 'Art', a 1994 play by French dramatist Yasmina Reza, bears all the hallmarks of its growing reputation - good traditional drama performed with pitch-perfect acting and stately direction. In fact, if you belong to that class of audience who baulk at anything oblique and experimental, you'd do well to stick to Nine Years Theatre and its classic notions of theatre.

Funnily enough, 'Art' is a chic comedy that tries to examine some of those notions, but in the realm of contemporary visual art: What makes good or bad art? Why are some "ugly" paintings considered important? How can a pure white canvas with thin white lines sell for 200,000 francs (S$282,600), when a perfectly decent painting of flowers sells for nothing?