Yasmina Reza: Mistress of the 'big idea lite'

Yasmina Reza's latest play, which opened amid an expectant buzz at the Royal National Theatre last week, is entitled Life x 3. And well it might be. Picture your average acclaimed dramatist, multiply their box-office success many times over and you get a notion of how big Reza is on the international theatre scene.

Yasmina Reza's latest play, which opened amid an expectant buzz at the Royal National Theatre last week, is entitled Life x 3. And well it might be. Picture your average acclaimed dramatist, multiply their box-office success many times over and you get a notion of how big Reza is on the international theatre scene.

Though still firmly based in her native France, this striking, dark-eyed actress-turned-dramatist has come to straddle state boundaries with nonchalant style. She is the most exported living playwright on the planet, a woman whose culturally rich background has given her real insight into the melting pot of today's society.

Reza's huge hit Art - which premiÿred in Paris in 1994 and depicts three male friends quarrelling when one of them splashes out on a modernist, all-white painting - has been translated into 35 languages. It has played everywhere from Sweden to South Africa, grossed more than £167m and won numerous awards including an Olivier and a Tony.

In the West End, one of its co-producers is Sean Connery, who was urged to see it in Paris by his wife and loved it so much he snapped up the English stage rights. It has since enjoyed an extraordinarily long sell-out run at Wyndham's Theatre, recently moving on to its 17th star cast (Warren Mitchell, Ken Campbell and John Fortune) and into its fifth year.

In 1995, the Royal Shakespeare Company's staging of The Unexpected Man, though a more challenging, experimental two-hander, successfully transferred to the West End with Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins playing mutually intrigued, internally musing strangers on a train. This production is due to transfer to New York with Atkins and Alan Bates.

Today Yasmina Reza's name seems to crop up everywhere. Even while Life x 3 was in rehearsal, the Almeida Theatre was touring its British premiÿre production of her post-funerary family drama, Conversations After a Burial. Translated (like Art and Life x 3) by Christopher Hampton, it boasted Claire Bloom among the cast. Faber has also lately published Hammerklavier, Reza's short novel-cum-memoir centring on her father's demise.

This November in France, Reza returned to stage acting after more than a decade, appearing in the world premiÿre of Life x 3 at the Thÿâtre Antoine in Paris as the humiliated wife, Ines (Imelda Staunton's role at the National). The production is sold out for the foreseeable future. The piece is also being produced in Athens and Vienna. Meanwhile Reza will be on the big screen in André Téchiné's forthcoming movie, Terminus des Anges, and an international bidding war is being fought over her wintry, philosophical novella of 1999, Une Désolation.

Reza's spare, minimalist approach to writing is doubtless a strength. After Conversations, which was a relatively digressive six-hander, Art, The Unexpected Man and Life x 3 have all been short chamber plays. Their compactness renders them overtly manageable, tightly focused and chic. Reza herself says, "I write very rarely. I write very quickly and very briefly, too."

The longevity of director Matthew Warchus's West End production of Art surely owes something to its astute casting policies, establishing short three-month contracts that entice big names who are too busy to commit for long. Enrolling celebrity stand-ups such as Jack Dee and Frank Skinner also drew fresh audiences.

Reza is not a prolific genius. You can count the plays produced over 13 years on the fingers of one hand. La Traversée de L'Hiver, written in 1990, is the only one that hasn't crossed the Channel yet. Conversations After a Burial is, in fact, her earliest piece and hardly her strongest, though it got her noticed as a promising talent in 1987.

In some ways, the opus matches the woman herself. Though exotic of feature and with flamboyant touches in her attire, Reza is elegantly tailored, small and very slim. She generally declines to sign books or appear on television chat shows. Interviews are rare. She keeps her age a secret (she is said to be fortyish) and says her plays are a mystery not to be discussed. She has commented that she may "want to be searched but not understood".

We do, however, know a fair few biographical facts. Her father was a Persian Jew, born in Russia, who was a bridge-designing engineer, a businessman and music-lover - playing the piano somewhat competitively with his daughter. Her mother is a Hungarian Jew who trained as a violinist in Geneva. Reza's maternal grandparents moved to New York, so she has relations there, too. Artistic family friends included Arthur Schnitzler.

She studied at Paris X Nanterre University and then trained at Jacques Lecoq's drama school, going on to act in Moliÿre and contemporary plays, channelling Lecoq's physical clowning into verbal wit. Her partner is the film director Didier Martigny whose latest film, Le Pique-Nique de Lulu Kreutz, she scripted. She is the mother of a 12-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son (born just after her beloved father's death).

But what is the key to her success? Christopher Hampton has described her as "rigorous, robust and quite sticky". A play such as Art offers something different to various nationalities. In London the writer was startled by the amount of laughter the all-white canvas raised, but she had tapped into a popular distrust of the arty-farty here as well as into a lurking interest in avant-garde art. When I spoke to Warchus about the transfer of his British production to Broadway, he surmised that Reza's spunky use of language was actually very New York in spirit and - with her characters seeing shrinks and popping pills for stress - that it might even be seen as a "homecoming" for the play.

Reza also manages to weave comic archetypes and universal themes into her scripts. In Life x 3, Mark Rylance's Henry - on the simplest level - is a farcical, dishevelled and distracted intellectual. In Art, Reza opposes a precious aesthete with a super-irascible bully, each with rigid opinions, while a compulsively wishy-washy middleman takes the flak from both. She clearly learnt from Moliÿre's popular comedy of humours, although she skilfully overlays caricatures with sharply observed modern satire and some complex psychology.

Reza often suggests that a specific relationship might stand for others. In Life x 3, Henry and his wife's desperate attempts to mollify their tantrum-throwing, preposterously demanding infant can look suspiciously like a flailing world peace summit. In Art, the men's tiff is laced with almost marital jealousy, the painting beginning to stand between them like an expensive mistress.

Reza originally saw the trio in Art as warring facets of herself - a further suggestion that her work transcends sexual differences.

Conversations After a Burial brings together sex and death (slightly crudely with a grave-top bout of passion). The Unexpected Man holds loneliness and attraction in tension; and the astrophysicists and their wives in Life x 3 ruminate on man's place in the universe.

Reza's concepts are never very difficult. Her skill is to offer "big ideas lite", keeping a broad audience happy. Her amalgamation of laughs with smart arguments and flashes of raw emotion is a crowd-pulling recipe. The playwright also understands - from the inside - how to pen parts that actors will queue up for, with virtuoso monologues and sharp switches of mood.

However, one can't help wondering if Life x 3 - with its amusingly awkward silences over pre-prandial snacks and its shift from jokes to viciously frank skirmishes - isn't rejigging formats used in Art. Some will, surely, hunger for more meaty intellectual content. Yasmina Reza may be spreading herself just too thin.

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