Peeling Back the Paint at Artspace, K Rd

By FRANCIS TILL

As a slight but funny work of ideas and pretence-popping, Peeling is well worth its hour.

The play starts as a mock forum on the arts in a small art gallery so the audience is led by its actual surroundings quite unwittingly into the action.

On stage at first is earnest Nelson potter Shirley Baring (author/actor Jo Randerson) waiting patiently for featured speaker Michelle Saint de Ville, a touring French multi-media artist (Jackie van Beek), and forum host, art critic John Smythe (Jeremy Randerson).

Smythe is absent for no apparent reason and de Ville is late out of nothing more than sheer arrogance, forcing Baring to don two hats, that of interviewer and artist.

The two women fall into often arch and always witty antagonism on a host of well-worn questions about the nature of art - whether a found object can be art, whether an artist should know her destination before beginning to create - and well-hashed issues of PC life as in: can one be bisexual, and do historical wrongs indict a people?

They fail utterly to reach any conclusions thankfully, and fall eventually into a physical brawl that has them rolling about on the floor, at which point critic Smythe appears on the scene by a video projection.

Smythe's virtual message is that none of this is real, it is the performance of a script he has discovered by accident, and that he refuses to participate in the charade. But wait, there are more layers. And then still more.

What ensues is Magus-lite. Unfortunately, not all the self-referential shoals are cleanly navigated but van Beek and Randerson are such strong performers that even the misses scored hits.

The final movement into open farce, though, seemed more a grab than a necessity, despite its charm. Peeling won both women a shared Fringe New Zealand Festival award this year for best comedy.

Directed somewhat loosely by Andrew Foster, it is on at Artspace from Wednesday to Saturday.