Picasso's surreal play comes to New York

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/oct/03/picasso-surreal-play-new-york

Version 0 of 1.

Pablo Picasso: playwright? The first of two plays written by the Spanish artist will receive a reading at the Guggenheim in New York next week, to coincide with an exhibition of his black-and-white work.

Composed in 1941, during four days of illness, Desire Caught By the Tail is a surrealist, non-linear farce that reportedly out-Becketts Samuel Beckett. Its second act consists of five pairs of feet outside the doors of hotel rooms, saying "My chilblains. My chilblains. My chilblains." This is then followed by a stage direction that calls for "the dancing shadows of five monkeys eating carrots".

The six-act play is described by the Guggenheim as a reflection of a day-to-day life in Paris during the second world war, though its original translator Bernard Frechtman argued otherwise. "It says nothing of human destiny or of the human condition," he wrote in his introduction. "This in itself is a considerable achievement."

Anne Bogart will direct the reading, which will be performed on 8 and 15 October, with a cast that includes the playwright John Guare, the artist's granddaughter Diana Picasso, and Richard Armstrong, the Guggenheim's director, in the role of Silence. Other characters in the play include Onion, Big Blonde Curtain and the protagonist Big Foot.

The play's first performance, a reading at the Paris home of writer Michel Leiris, took place in March 1944 and featured Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Valentine Hugo, as well as Picasso himself. Albert Camus directed. It was revived by the Guggenheim in 1984 with David Hockney and Louise Bourgeois in the cast.

Picasso's other play, written in 1947, is a plotless stream-of-consciousness piece entitled The Four Little Girls. The artist regularly designed for the stage, and also collaborated with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes on several occasions.