IN the forest of publicity for Les Dennis starring in Art, it would be easy to overlook this celebrity show being the first fruit of Hannah Chissick's tenure as Harrogate Theatre's youngest ever artistic director.

Repertory productions of John Godber's Teechers and Stephen Sondheim's Side By Side will follow but first up for the former Derby Playhouse director is a play of old acquaintance. After graduating from the University of Hull, Chissick was assistant director on Art in London and New York, and post-Derby she directed Yasmina Reza's Parisian comedy in the West End with Jamie Theakston, Stephen McGann and Chris Luscombe.

She knows her Art, and it shows in this new production of rising emotional heat, well-executed individual and collective performances and superbly judged pacing as three friendships fall apart under the influence of one expensive modish painting acquisition.

Les Dennis, from Russ Abbot's Madhouse and the madhouse of Celebrity Big Brother, is joined in the increasingly maddening hothouse of Art by fellow celebs John Duttine and Christopher Cazenove.

As with Chelsea's new Fantasy Football Team turned real, there can be no certainty the component parts will bind, but Art has a habit of pulling together its performers as their characters' friendship disintegrates, and that was the case last night, as early as performance number three.

The stage curtain, with the back of a painting at its centre in the first witty touch of Chissick's production, rises on Mark Thompson's white-as-heaven set, where the latest fashionable purchase in the pristine, clutter-free flat of dermatologist Serge (Cazenove) is an all-white painting with undetectable white lines, price 200,000 francs.

His friend Marc (Duttine), a cynical aeronautical engineer and new-style intellectual with a preference for the old style, sneers at the price and the artwork and feels instant unease that the purchase makes him think differently of Serge. Mutual friend Yvan (Dennis), newly working for his fiancee's family as a stationery sales agent, always tries to please everyone, and here he must play the trapeze artist on an emotional high wire, upsetting both friends in his attempts not to do so.

This is not a rotating-door French farce but more a sit-down-and-chew comic drama in both English and American vein, routed in the classic comic structure of a triangle in a study of surface and depth, shallow value and true worth.

Duttine, Cazenove and Dennis, particularly in Yvan's rant scene, are the gloss on this mischievous canvas, and Chissick is off to a flyer.

Art visits Hull New Theatre, October 20 to 25.

Box office: 01423 502116

Updated: 12:37 Wednesday, September 17, 2003