Art (Whitehall Theatre)

And now for something completely different: no, not Monty Python, but the comedy troupe sometimes regarded as their modern successors, the League of Gentlemen, who have shed the sketches and taken on a full-length play to become the 27th and final cast of Art.

This long running comedy of Parisian male manners and modern art has been in the West End since October 1996 - almost exactly as long as the League themselves, who first came to prominence at the Edinburgh Fringe in August that year - and will finally close in January next year.

The League are not the first comedians to star in the show - Jack Dee, Frank Skinner and Sean Hughes have all been in it - but they're the first ready-made trio to take over.

And they do so with a genuine, rather than actorly, rapport that gives the play's tale of long-term friendships an extra resonance.

Yasmina Reza's play - which revolves around the friendship of three men that is fatally disrupted when one of them buys an expensive modern work of art that resembles nothing so much as a blank white canvas - remains a giddy, elegant delight.

Reece Shearsmith is a little too giddy with Yvan's furious diatribe about his impending wedding - the laughs are landing so hard that some others are being lost in the process.

But he is a particularly touching and vulnerable go-between, desperately sitting on the fence in the conflict that erupts between his friends Serge (Mark Gatiss) and Marc (Steve Pemberton), and finding - as you do - that those who sit on fences are liable to get splinters.

Take a Thames Tour of Rotherhithe including the home of London's whaling and timber trades

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