The sparks keep flying in Nicole Buffoni’s strong production of American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s taut, engrossing drama, A PICASSO, currently playing at Kirribilli’s Ensemble Theatre.
The play starts with the great Pablo Picasso (Danny Adcock) pacing up and down a dark, underground bunker in German occupied Paris in 1941. The sound of Nazi storm-troopers marching in the streets comes from above.
A door opens and an attractive officer from the German Cultural Ministry, Miss Fischer (Sharon Millerchip), puts on the light and walks, slowly and deliberately, down the stairs.
Miss Fischer has been given firm, inviolable instructions from her bosses. The Gestapo is demanding that the great Spanish artist hand over A PICASSO or his freedom, even perhaps his life, will be taken away from him.
Creative artists are renowned for their intensity and passion. The great American writer Jack Kerouac once said, ‘I married my novels, and my short stories are my children’. Like-minded, Picasso does not agree to Miss Fischer’s deal, and a torrid, relentless encounter ensues.
They try to tear each other to shreds. Picasso despises the regime and it’s perniciousness, ‘Every week a pair of Germans visit to see if I’ve hidden any Jews in the kilns’. Miss Fischer tells Picasso, ‘Your Arts dealer was a Jew who ran away. I hear these days you hide gold in cupboards where soup should be’.
Miss Fischer rails at Picasso about the uselessness of the arts in such times, ‘Schubert’s music plays whilst the bombs fall. The bombs win’.
In one of the play’s many surprising reveals it comes out that Miss Fischer has come from a very cultured, middle-class background, and the two go on to argue and debate about politics, sexuality and religion as well as the value of art.
Like the characters that they inhabit, Danny Adcock and Sharon Millerchip give absolutely everything to their performances.
A compelling night at the theatre, Nicole Buffoni’s production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s A PICASSO opened at the Ensemble Theatre, 28 McDougall Street, Kirribilli, on Friday 28th September and plays until Saturday 20th October, 2012. Performance times vary. Check the Ensemble website- www.ensemble.com.au- for details.
(c) David Kary
An edited version of this review was published in the Australian Jewish News Sydney Volume 119, Friday 5th October, 2012
Tags: Sydney Theatre Reviews- A PICASSO, Jeffrey Hatcher, Nicole Buffoni, Danny Adcock, Sharon Millerchip, Ensemble Theatre.