Picasso in a pickle

A one door farce at Corpus Playroom in Cambridge

A bizarre episode in art history provides the farcical subject for an hour of surreal student theatre complete with quick dialogue and mischief with pamplemousses at Cambridge’s Corpus Playroom until Saturday.

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  Picasso stole the Mona Lisa, billed as a `one- door tragi-farce’, is based on the audacious theft of the iconic Mona Lisa from The Louvre. This absurd incident thus provides excellent material for writer Jamie Fenton. There’s some decent clowning, and a few great lines, and the hot jazz of Django Reinhardt propels our players through this light hour of silliness.
  
  
  Showing at the cosy Corpus Playroom until Saturday 24 January, a dishevelled artist’s garret provides the setting sparely furnished with a chaise longue and a covered easel. This is the Parisian boudoir of enfant terrible Guillaume Apollinaire, novelist, poet and sometime journalist who once called for The Louvre to be burnt down and who stumbles through the single door of the `L’ Shaped playroom and into a pickle. 
  
  
  That covered easel turns out to be the Mona Lisa, and Apollinairee played by Haydn Jenkins and bohemian buddy Picasso (Yaseen Kader) are baffled as to how the renaissance masterpiece came to be in their shabby apartment. And so the farcical fun begins.
  
  
  At this juncture it may be worth explaining the episode upon which this anarchic comedy by it’s own admission is loosely based.
  
  
  In September 1911 the world was shocked by the theft of the Mona Lisa from The Louvre. Former gallery employee Vincenzo Peruggia would later cite patriotic reasons for the theft but would evade capture for two years by which time he had returned with the painting to their native Italy and shared his humble lodgings with the most famous painting in the world.
  
  
  So how did those two starving artists come to be involved?
  
  
  Apollinaire was arrested for aiding and abetting Peruggia whom he sheltered in his apartment and under questioning implicated his friend Pablo Picasso. Nonchalant cubist Picasso unimpressed by Da Vinchi’s masterpiece at one point receives a dressing down from Apollinaire ‘You’re just jealous because your oeuvre is not in The Louvre.’
  
  
  The enjoyable posturing pairing of Picasso and Apollinaire are realised well by Jenkins and Kader as skinny and shambolic, and an excellent sepia tinted silent film projected onto the playroom wall showing our hapless heroes attempting to dispose of the painting is a hoot. Colin Rothwell as a gendarme and frustrated art history scholar is excellent.
  
  
  Set around the same period but altogether more serious, Albert Camus’ Les Justes also at Corpus (10^th-14^th February) promises another highlight at this intimate venue where very reasonably priced tickets mean it’s always worth taking a chance. 
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• Commissioned and first published by Local Secrets
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