Although Yasmina Reza's Art has been running in the West End for so long it's in danger of becoming the Mousetrap of conceptual comedy, that doesn't make it an easy option for any old comic smart-arse with a skip-full of one-liners and a wardrobe crammed with West Brom away strips. So why did Frank Skinner agree to sign up to play the indecisive, well-meaning Yvan? "He who risks nothing does nothing," claims Skinner. "You have to fucking go for it."

As indeed he does. Finding himself drifting helplessly between his argumentative chums Marc and Serge, his own indecisiveness merely serving to goad them into new frenzies of rottweilerish competitiveness, he suffers an eardrum-bursting belt round the ear. Then he gets to indulge himself with a high-speed monologue about his impending wedding and trouble with the in-laws which earns applause for sheer velocity rather than content, and is finally allowed to go all intense and self-revelatory when he bursts into tears and reveals his most intimate and humiliating insecurities.

Great stuff. But is it Art? Undeniably, there's Art Malik playing Serge, the man who triggers a whole world of trouble between the play's tightly-knit trio of characters by paying 200,000 francs for an all-white painting (when Christopher Hampton translated the piece from French into English, would it have been too much to expect him to convert the currency into pounds?). In the role of the prickly, pretension-busting Marc, there's Nicholas Woodeson, veteran of everything from The Midsomer Murders to lots of Harold Pinter and even Alan Pakula's film of The Pelican Brief.

But the fact that Skinner, stand-up comic, chat-show host and veteran of interminably gruesome football ladathons with David "Mr Smug" Baddiel, can slot so comfortably into the cast provokes teasing questions about the nature of the piece. Art seeks to probe into the value of friendship, the value people place on possessions, and whether or not artistic quality can exist separately from the fluctuations of fashion and market forces. Big questions, but once they've been laid out in the play's early exchanges, it's arguable whether they develop any further as the action progresses. The performers are asked to shuffle through a set of attitudes, from anger and indignation to petulance and self-pity, but it's more like watching people try on a set of masks than tracing a plausible process of character development.

So maybe the stand-up comic's knack for flashing rapidly between viewpoints and scenarios is exactly what Art needs. After all, Skinner isn't the first comic who's stepped into the Artistic breach. Jack Dee did it - he enjoyed it so much he played two of the play's three roles - and the last Yvan was George "Fat Bloke" Wendt. Art is a self-mocking joke - it's a play of indeterminate quality, about the indefinable nature of artistic merit. The fact that it's been translated from the original French merely makes it more chameleon-like, placing it somewhere between Gallic pretension and the Anglo-Saxon urge to strip away anything florid or philosophical. It's weird, but somehow it works.

• At Wyndhams Theatre, London (0171-369 1736).