Art and the Boundaries of Friendship

Last night I saw French playwright Yasmina Reza’s Art at the Grand Theatre here in London. Art is a short (90 minute) comedy about friendship more than art.

It’s about three long-time friends, Serge, Marc, and Yvan. Serge, indulging his penchant for modern art, buys a large, expensive, completely white painting. Marc is horrified and reacts as it if were a personal insult. Their relationship suffers considerable strain as a result of their differing opinions about what constitutes “art”. Yvan is caught in the middle of the growing tension and accusations of betrayal and tries to appease both of them.

The exploration of male friendship, complete with laughter and tears, made me think again of the power of friendship, people choosing to keep track of one another despite barriers of time and space: what C.S. Lewis called “that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen.”

Who’s your closest friend? Who is the one person whose company you savor and who counsel you seek? What is the nature of your relationship? How honest are you?
Art asks how much truth and honesty human beings can stand by pointing out the little elephants in the room of friendship, the tiny things that irritate but which you ignore without the need to forgive. Not the casual things you can – and do – tease them about, but the darker things that would undermine and perhaps terminate a weaker friendship. What would happen if those thoughts were exposed?

Should we be candid about the things we dislike in our friends or should we bury them for the sake of an ongoing friendship? Someone said that whereas love is blind, friendship closes its eyes. And sometimes it closes its ears and its mouth. Soon after Jack Benny died, George Burns was asked about his relationship to Benny. George flicked his unlit cigar and said ‘Jack and I had a wonderful friendship for nearly 55 years; Jack never walked out me when I sang a song, and I never walked out on him when he played the violin.”

The boundaries of friendship are not easily drawn. If you have someone with whom you can do or say just about anything without fear of being judged or rejected, you are lucky and you should do everything in your power to keep that friendship alive. Dinah Maria Mulock Craik said it best:

Oh, the comfort – the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
Having neither to weigh thoughts,
Nor measure words – but pouring them
All right out – just as they are –
Chaff and grain together –
Certain that a faithful hand will
Take and sift them –
Keep what is worth keeping-
And with the breath of kindness
Blow the rest away.