Citizens', Glasgow Star rating: **** As its subtitle - A play about fathers and sons - makes clear, Mike Maran's latest solo narrative is not really a biog of the great painter, although you'll learn plenty about him and those around him. The story is as much that of a fictitious figure, the estranged son of the manager of the Clydesdale Bank in Strathpeffer, who encounters the artist in a formative year of his late teens. And even that is only half the stories.
Maran, creator of a hugely popular adaptation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin as well as Bank of Scotland Herald Angel-winning shows about R D Laing and Gustav Mahler, is a master of overlapping narratives with a relaxed style that allow him to cover any errors in his way through them in with a quick conversational recap.
It helps that his script is, as usual, so well constructed that it keeps amusingly referring back to itself - here, for example, in references to the sexual allure of Princess Margaret.
Peppered with facts, myths and conjecture, Maran's journey is brilliantly paced and just when it starts to seem rather too lecture-like he produces a big emotional punch at the end.
Directed by Patrick Sandford, Picasso and Me has a fine soundrack by Karen Wimhurst (who also scored the Mahler show) and the hand-knitted use of visual aids is oddly suited to a story that is, after all, significantly concerned with the greatest of twentieth-century art.
Runs until Saturday - further dates in Dunkeld, Ullapool, Langholm, and Peebles.
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