REVIEWSHUB
Written in 2017, it nevertheless feels like this is a keenly appropriate time for a production of Picasso. The rumbling discourse over whether we could, or should, divorce art from artist grew louder as 2022 closed, though it remains, of course, unresolved.
Peter Tate’s hour-long work perhaps seeks to chart a middle ground, giving insight into how Pablo Picasso’s immense ego and rotten approach to women were a driving force in his creative process and resulted directly in a large portion of his work.
Tate himself is the show’s sole live performer, though he appears with others in filmed scenes projected throughout. He is the eponymous Picasso, posthumously intent on telling us all about his attitude to, and relationships with, women. We’re taken through his actions and his beliefs as they relate to his wife Olga, then a series of lovers and mistresses, mothers of his children, and muses.
It’s a fascinating portrait. Tate’s performance and script are deeply engaging, enthralling, and exciting. Picasso himself is shown as deeply dysfunctional when it comes to women – seeming to take pride in his destructive influence and has misogynistic ideas most recently seen in Andrew Tate’s dreadful oeuvre. His ego is a thing of wonder, the engine behind his art and his seductions. We hear “I have magic powers I do not understand,” “I am God,” and “I do capture the sun’s secret.” He truly believes his stylish drawings entitle him to, well, everything.
Tate inhabits this forceful belief wonderfully. Pacing around the small set and alternating rants with egotistical pronouncements and calm descriptions of what we’d now see as abusive behaviour. It’s riveting, awful.
Director Guy Masterson and Tate take care to build their story, rather than chase excitement prematurely. The restraint in the scripting is nurtured well by the pacing and direction, ensuring that by the time we get to the deeper revelations and surprises we have a rock-sure foundation of understanding of this character thanks to an information-laden first section.
Eirina Kariori’s simple set consists of a paint spattered groundsheet with a cushion, a ladder, and white gauze curtains. This encircles Picasso, forming a rippled and ethereal backdrop on which his emotions are mapped, and memories of the women he seduced and toyed with are projected via Steven Dean Moore’s video and lighting.
There’s no doubt Picasso can be credited with immense talent, for art and for promotion. This piece of theatre makes great strides in showing off two key sources of energy for that talent, making the case that they’re indivisible from the output. Whether an observer sees this as a positive or negative thing is not really the play’s business. It gives inspiring raw material for further personal reflection on this weighty question. (Karl ODoherty 27/01/22)

THE UPCOMING
Playground Theatre’s Picasso should be paired with a sparkling alcoholic drink to lament the narcissism of a man whose art was built around the women he saw as beneath him (figuratively and literally), from the taking of his mother’s surname to quotes like “My art needs a new woman” to justify every new affair that came his way. It’s witty and fun, yet visceral and uncomfortable. A circular stage illuminated by warm orange and yellow lights draws the audience’s attention, a fitting metaphor for Pablo Picasso’s constant allusion to the sun and how it relates to his revolving door of relationships through the years. “Stop looking at the sun, you could go blind,” he says – a phrase he appropriates from his mother, who is portrayed as the foundation for the artist’s long and misogynistic history with women.
Picasso touches on delicate topics surrounding the divide between creator and creation, while exploring its subject’s predatory nature (evidenced in his paternal attitude to romance with ex-lovers and his constant victim blaming). Peter Tate traps himself in the mind of Picasso, giving a wonderfully accurate depiction of a man tortured by his own dependency on the opposite sex. The actor is an expert at deflection, quite convincing as his character tries to justify bad behaviour. He also has a multitude of voices for capturing the artist’s vision of innocence and naïveté in his conquests. Of course, the audience will see the irony in his bravado: always looking down on women, yet cannot function without them. He’s absolutely right when he says, “Cubism and I are full of deception”, but, more than that, Tate expertly cuts the tension with singing and dancing as the scenes transition from one relationship to another.
A curtain frames the stage in the round, often used as a backdrop for pre-filmed and archival footage. In the context of a one-man play, this is a fantastic way of populating the space and providing different energy to contrast with Tate’s constant pacing and erratic behaviour. Reuben Bojang does seamless work on the light transitions and sound mixing; the alternating red and blue during the intimate scenes balances Picasso’s aggressive tendencies in bed and the artistic grievances he uses to reel in women to sleep with him.
While not exactly an accurate retelling of his true life and journey, the piece is happily upfront and honest, stating clearly: “They were great artists; I’m an entertainer” – and entertain Tate’s Picasso does. (Mae Trumata 27/01/23)