THEATRE:Andrew Wilson
STEVE MARTIN’s award-winning play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, currently running at the Civic Theatre, bears a marked resemblance to Nicholas Roeg’s brilliant 1985 film Insignificance, sharing not only the concept, but some of the characters.
Working from Terry Johnson’s satirical script, Roeg’s film gathers together four prominent characters from the Fifties in a hotel room where they discuss life, sex, the theory of relativity, and the universe. Similarly, Steve Martin’s play juggles with the same topics in the same situation, albeit at the turn of the century.
Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe make appearances in both texts, but where Roeg’s Monroe uses toy trains to teach Einstein the theory of relativity, Steve Martin’s Monroe is a contrived, gratuitous non- character. Similarly, where Roeg’s Einstein is a complex creature, Martin portrays him as no more than an extension of his theories.
As a concept and a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile has the potential to be a compelling theatrical fantasy, but in this production it delivers little more than a bland, laboured sitcom.
A lack of imaginative direction hamstrings a production that boasts a cast with vast acting muscle, resulting in a confusing swamp of accents and varying acting styles, that only serves to highlight the underlying contrivance of the concept – a contrivance that could have found resonance in its absurdity.
If theatre is primarily a visual medium which depends on suspending the audience’s disbelief in order to compel and entertain, then Picasso at the Lapin Agile, operating as it does on the level of realism rather than theatrical illusion, is an opportunity lost.