Yasmina Reza - Plays 1

Yasmina Reza's award-winning comedy Art is collected here with three more of her sharp witty and sexy plays, all translated with elegance and élan by Christopher Hampton

Art

Serge has bought a modern painting for a huge sum of money

Mark hates it and cannot believe that a friend of his could possibly want such a work

Yvan attempts, unsuccessfully, to placate both sides

The question is, are you who you think you are or are you who your friends think you are?

And if your friendship is based on tacit mutual agreement, what happens when one person does something completely different?

Life x 3

Henri and Sonia are putting their son to bed when an unexpected knock at the door throws them into disarray

Hubert and Ines have arrived for dinner, a day earlier than expected

As the evening degenerates, Yasmina Reza blends cruel observations with high comedy in an hilarious and poignant examinatioin of our most personal intimacies and private longings

The Unexpected Man

A train compartment, a man and a woman

In a series of dazzling internal monologues, the man, a novelist, muses on his latest work, contemplates the futility of writing and considers his life in terms of his daughter, her lover and the workings of Ex-Lax on his digestive system

The woman thinks of her life, her loves and friendships in the full knowledge that the man she is facing is the novelist she admires and would love to speak to, and whose latest work she has tucked in her handbag

Conversations After a Burial

Simon Weinberg is dead

On a November morning, six people gather at his funeral - siblings, lovers and in-laws

Mourning allows them special privilege and, for a few hours, they are isolated in another world under a lingering sun, in the shadow of the deceased

Conversations After a Burial examines the intense pause between loss and life, between absence and the return to everyday existence