MORNING STAR REVIEW – PETER FROST
MAR
2014
Saturday 15TH
posted by Morning Star in Arts
Artful response to the jackboot
Picasso's
Artful Occupation
Barons Court
Theatre
London W14
5 Stars
Ian Buckley's
new play Picasso's Artful Occupation is set in the autumn of 1940 when Hitler's
troops occupied Paris. During that time the painter Pablo Picasso was in
voluntary exile in France.
Like his
fellow painter Henri Matisse, writers like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Cocteau, he had chosen Paris as his home. Many of
them held strongly left-wing, communist views.
Hitler and
the nazis declared much of this left-inspired art to be "Bolshevik"
and "degenerate" and part of their 1940 looting process demanded the
cataloguing of thousands of valuable works of art.
Picasso,
though his art was officially banned, continued to paint in his Left Bank
studio and Buckley's play finds the artist, brought alive by Gary Heron in the
vaults of the Paris branch of the Bank of Industry and Commerce, with two young
German officers who are cataloguing the painter's works.
One of them
is Frisch (Roberto Landi), himself an artist, who is trying to understand how
art and politics are changing under the new nazi order.
The other,
Hebbel (David O'Connor), has discovered the dirty postcards for sale on the
city's street corners. For him they are more interesting than Picasso's curious
creations.
The interplay
between the three characters, tightly directed by Kenneth Michaels, asks and
sometimes answers questions about how an artist with strong socialist
principles and beliefs can live and create great art under the fascist
jackboot.
As with all
his plays Buckley manages to combine serious historical political issues with
drama, humour and a few visual fireworks - not too different from a Picasso
painting, in fact.
Runs until March 30. Box office: (020) 8932-4747.
Peter FrostTh