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Pablo Picasso: the great self-publicist, the first artistic millionaire and a man with a gargantuan appetite for work, life and sex. Jaime Sabartes: lifelong friend, helper, publicist, business manager, biographer and confidant.

From poverty stricken youth in Barcelona to international success as leading players in the artistic avant garde Pablo Picasso and Jaime Sabartes lived through much together. But now is the time of reckoning....
It is 1973 and Picasso has just died. Instead of going before a divine judge he comes face to face with the one person who knows everything about him, his life-long friend and confidant, Jaime Sabartes....however Sabartes is no longer the oppressed doormat he once was. He starts to take Picasso apart....

Beside Picasso is a verbally venomous, effervescent, often hilarious exploration of power, friendship, sex, money, and the nature of genius.

Beside Picasso, after opening at the Maltings Arts Centre, Farnham, in the autumn of 1999 mounted two national tours, playing at small-scale venues, the second of which was organised by Guy Chapman Associates. The production then accompanied McAvera’s Picasso’s Women as part of a featured season of Platform Performances at the Royal National Theatre, following which ajtc performed the play at the Edinburgh Festival, the Belfast Festival and the Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam. ajtc mounted a further national tour of the play in the autumn of 2002. A year later Beside Picasso toured Holland and also played at Berlin’s Friends of Italian Opera.