THE open-air theatre season tends to bring the strawberries and cream of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Jane Austen's repertoire. A little art to accompany your al fresco supper beneath a darkening sky.

How refreshing that Chapterhouse Theatre Company, from Lincoln, is seeking to stretch its 2004 portfolio to incorporate not only the summer stables of A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It but Art.

Yasmina Reza's Parisian comedy has become one of the darlings of the West End, being a magnet to a host of celebrity casts. Nigel Havers is one such star, and having been involved in "this wonderful play" for the last seven years, playing the part of Serge both in the West End and on tour, he says it feels like coming home to be directing the Chapterhouse production.

Describing Art and its female-authored dissection of men and friendship as one of the genius plays of the past 50 years, he asserts that it is equally suited to big stage or, as in the case of the Chapterhouse show, a more intimate chamber setting. Intimate may seem a strange choice of word in the windswept open space of Fountains Abbey - a painting twice went crashing off a chair - but the play is indeed contained within an all-white set design of chairs, coffee table and rotating walls by designers Andy Dorritt and Rob Anderson.

The white enhances the enveloping sense of the audience observing a laboratory, where friends of 15 years' standing suddenly start to drive each other under mad when a new factor is introduced: a modish white painting with undetectable white lines, bought by suave dermatologist Serge (Tom Sykes) for the price of 200,000 francs.

His friend Marc (Kyle Reece), a cynical aeronautical engineer and new-style intellectual, sneers at the price and the artwork, uneasy that the purchase makes him think differently of Serge. Mutual friend Yvan (David Chittenden), newly working for his fiancee's family as a stationery sales agent, plays the Swiss neutral card, duly upsetting both friends in his attempts not to do so.

Art has a habit of pulling together its performers as their characters' friendship disintegrates, and in the past this has made for an extra layer of interest when seeing West End casts put together by Matthew Warchus, almost as if it were a mini-version of Celebrity Big Brother.

However, Havers has eschewed that casting policy in favour of picking a trio of "stars in the making", having held auditions in different combinations of three.

He has chosen well, because Reece, Sykes and Chittenden bubble up the cauldron of emotional heat and ally individual flourishes with collective intensity. What's more, the mischievous cut-and-thrust of Reza's study of surface and depth, shallow value and true worth comes through all the stronger for the removal of celebrity gold dust.

Updated: 11:16 Monday, July 05, 2004