The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s theatrical voice is at once unexpected and inevitable. Best known to many as a stand-up comedian and film star, he here applies his comedian’s ear and a surprising dramaturg’s restraint to a body of work that asks: what happens when genius is treated as a social fact rather than an untouchable aura? Picasso at the Lapin Agile — the centrepiece of this collection — is a short, gleaming parable about invention, fame, and the slippery distance between idea and historical legend. Read as a play-text, and then again as a work of cultural theory in disguise, it repays repeated readings and productions.

A quick précis

Set in a small Montmartre café in 1904, the play stages an imagined encounter between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein on the eve of their respective breakthroughs. Surrounding them are a cast of comic foils: a braggart inventor, a wistful salon owner, local eccentrics — all of whom ground the play in the small-scale, quotidian human comedy against which “great ideas” seem almost accidentally to emerge. Martin’s setup is deliciously simple: a meeting that never took place become a crucible where the future of art and science is debated, threatened, and, in the end, deferred to the messy contingencies of human vanity and timing.

Form, tone, and theatrical intelligence

The author writes with a playwright’s economy. The dialogue is crisp and rhythmically alive — jokes land as arguments, and arguments double as physical business. There is a vaudevillian backbone to the play’s comic machinery: entrances and exits, misunderstandings, and the climactic misrecognition of genius. Yet beneath the vaudeville skeleton is a serious dramaturgical ambition. Martin borrows liberally from the absurdist tradition (Ionesco’s set-piece logic, Beckett’s existential gag), but he refuses the coldness that sometimes accompanies that lineage. His absurdity is warm: it uses laughter to open a space for thought.

One of the play’s most effective devices is its anachronism. Rather than fetishizing historical accuracy, it lets modern idiom and later cultural knowledge slip into the mouths of its characters. The effect is not jarring so much as clarifying: genius, he seems to suggest, is a retroactive label, applied to particular gestures by later narratives. The play dramatizes the “invention” of genius as much as it dramatizes the creative act itself.

Themes and tensions

At the core of Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a tension between theory and practice, between the idea and its social reception. Einstein articulates the abstract — the relativity of time and the architecture of scientific thought — while Picasso, in Martin’s imagining, embodies the stubborn materiality of painting: form, surface, and the stubborn refusal to be reduced to a verbal formula. This juxtaposition generates a series of comic and philosophical riffs about what it means to be “ahead of one’s time.”

Another running concern is the commodification of genius. The story interrogates how reputation is manufactured: by time, by rumour, by theatrical moments staged for the wrong reasons. The Lapin Agile itself becomes an allegory for the venues of cultural production — small, messy, and subject to the accidents that determine who becomes canonical.

Language, characterization, and stagecraft

Martin’s language moves deftly between clever one-liners and quieter, elegiac moments. His characters are sketched economically but indelibly: they are archetypes with interiorities, comic masks that occasionally slip to reveal human vulnerability. The play’s stage directions are not mere ordinance; they are devices for comic timing, suggesting that Martin’s playwrightly imagination is as much physical as verbal. Productions of this play tend to exploit its closeness to physical comedy — but clever direction can also lay bare its philosophical heart without dulling the laughs.

Where the collection matters

The “other plays” gathered with Picasso in this edition function as counterpoints: they show an exploring of theatrical forms and comic registers with curiosity rather than repetition. Even when the plots are slight, the attention to dramatic rhythm, the pleasure in language, and the interest in human foibles persist. Together, they map a trajectory from the gag-centred to the quietly reflective — an arc that mirrors Martin’s own career shift from comedian to multifaceted artist.

Appraisal

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a modern parable that uses comedy as a thinking tool. It is not merely a pastiche of historical figures for laughs; it’s a compact meditation on how culture names and narrates genius. Steve Martin’s gift is to make us laugh while making us notice the machinery that produces meaning. For actors, directors, and readers interested in how comedy can carry philosophical weight, this play (and the companion pieces in the volume) is indispensable. It invites productions that are at once playful and precise, and it rewards readers who come to the stage text ready to admire both its jokes and its argument.

In short: this is comic theatre with a brain and a heart — mischievous, thoughtful, and quietly, insistently theatrical.