‘My friend Serge bought a painting,’ announces Marc, alone on stage, as the curtain rises. ‘It's a canvas measuring about one metre sixty by one metre twenty, painted white. The background is white, and if you squint, you can see thin diagonal white lines.’

Thus begins Art, the most performed contemporary French play in the world. Three old friends arrange to spend an evening together, and the aforementioned white painting with white stripes becomes, line after line, the catalyst that brings to light neuroses, grudges and rivalries that had remained dormant until now.

In this cruel and amusing comedy about friendship, the increasingly poisonous and cutting exchanges of words expose the fragile structure of the relationship between Marc, Serge and Yvan, built on selfishness, vanity and hypocrisy: it reaches peaks of cruel comedy, it amuses and entertains us, because we laugh a lot even if the smile is increasingly forced as melancholy emerges.

Written and performed by Michele Riondino and Daniele Parisi.