It’s true to say that Pablo Picasso looms large over the history of 20th century art. When available, his art sells for eye-watering sums, whilst the rest adorns the walls of the world’s most elite galleries (and private mansions). Hannah Gadsby’s controversial oversight of the Picasso exhibition at the Brooklyn museum left no one in doubt of their, and much of the public’s opinion. Picasso was the ultimate narcissist, and an abusive, perverted misogynist who obliterated the lives of the women unfortunate enough to catch his eye. Which brings us to ‘Picasso: Le Monstre Sacré’, a new play from Terry D’Alfonso, and premiered at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
The blurb suggests this one man theatrical undertaking is an opportunity for the audience to make their own evaluation of Picasso the man. I’ll come back to that. Peter Tate makes an intense Picasso, his performance utterly committed and unflinching. This is a priapic obsessive lurching from one ultimate love to the next, a creature utterly committed to their art, and president of their own cult of personality. His obsession with the minotaur is theatrical and melodramatic, ‘One cannot love the minotaur, and live’ he declares, a self-absolution if there ever was one.
After all, if no one can love you, then what do you owe them in return?
Guy Masterson knows how to stage an evocative show, unsurprisingly, and the pared down set consisting of a white sheet hung in an encapsulating semi-circle, a ragged pillow, and a step-ladder certainly focusses attention. It provides a canvas for projected films conjuring Picasso’s various amours as his mind turns from one to the next.
That pillow comes in for a lot of action, the scene of the artists relentless conquests. Indeed this is a play in orbit around sex, and Tate puts his hips to work. Fortunately, said hips spend more time engaged in dance, drawing on Tate’s previous experience, and one suspects a few flamenco lessons. It’s a visceral, stamping celebration of the self, and a motif returned to again, and again. One suspects the pillow-based romps could feel a little excessive to some, but if aside from his talent one thing is true of Pablo, it’s that he struggled to keep it in his pants.
So far as I can see, there’s little however placed in front of the audience in Picasso’s defence, other than an initial bout of sibling envy, when a younger sister is born. He is, D’Alfonso maybe suggesting, a creature perpetually in search for the perfect, all-consuming love he ‘lost’ when his mother committed the sin of another birth. After this, however, Picasso not only confesses to being a destroyer of women, he explains in great detail precisely how he goes about it.
It’s a relief when his penultimate lover, Françoise Gilot, a celebrated artist in her own right, tells him precisely where he can stick his chauvinistic bullsh*t.
Thus the play arrives precisely where Gadsby did, with Picasso, the artistic minotaur, and despicable excuse for a human being. His final terminus in the play brings to mind Betty Davis’s reaction to her long-time nemesis’s death, “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead… good!” Now substitute Picasso.
Any play that can raise such visceral dislike in an audience is doing something right, but if there is supposed to be a case for his (partial) absolution, it is somewhat lacking. Tate, however, is magnificent, his voice a thing of beauty, spouting forth the self-justifications of a narcissist. Picasso: Le Monstre Sacré is certainly a success, but if anyone comes to any other conclusion, I rather hope never to meet them.
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