Performer Mike Maran set off to discover Picasso and found a father and son reunion instead.

WE know about Picasso and his women but we never discuss Picasso the son and father. So says the one-man show phenomenon Mike Maran who reveals he unwittingly uncovered his feelings about father-son relationships after starting work on Picasso And Me, a celebration of the great Spanish painter's legacy.

After successful tours of productions based on The Little World Of Don Camillo and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Maran admits he switched his attention to Pablo Picasso directly as a result of being a 50-something man visiting art galleries for the first time in his life.

"With anyone that's seen any of the previous work we've done, they'll understand that the approach to these things is quite personal. The problem with Picasso is that although I was fascinated with the subject there was no relationship between me and Picasso at all apart from the fact that my children got into art history and I've gone around art galleries with them. I'm in my late 50s now and I'm not an art gallery guy, but my two sons taught me how to look at paintings and this whole Picasso thing interested me and there were people leaning on me to do it," he says of the production he's bringing to Darlington Arts Centre on Tuesday and Wednesday.

After being loaned a great deal of art material and biographies he produced a first draft based on Picasso stories which he found fascinating.

"I showed it to a director and he said to me 'it looks like you're trying to write a show about fathers and sons but you just haven't got the courage to face it'. I was astonished at what he said and when I looked through I realised that out of the artist's huge output of 30,000 paintings I'd picked out pictures of his sons and portraits of his father. It was like the director was some kind of therapist looking at what I'd done and I hadn't realised I'd done it myself. I thought 'hang on a second, Picasso is trying to tell me something or certainly the director is' and I just went back, threw everything else out and re-wrote it," he explains.

"Instead of going off with a sawed-off shotgun I've come up with something a wee bit more acute," Mike jokes.

The plot of Picasso And Me has Mike narrating the story of a man buying a portrait from a Paris gallery which he thinks is the same one he posed for when Picasso painted him as a young hippie back in 1966.

He admits his own father would have been horrified if he'd known of a son spending a day with Picasso. "To him it would be like I'd spent a day with the devil. My relationship with my father was a tricky one and so was Picasso's sons' relationship with him. I just have this feeling that most fathers and sons have a fairly tricky relationship. There will be a lot of people in the audience who'll know what I'm talking about. This just seems to pass down the generations. If there's a line of hope in this play towards the end, it involves the estrangement between fathers and sons that goes on in squandering a relationship and that it doesn't have to be like that. Somebody just has to pick up the phone and say hello," explains Mike who claims that even the dark moments of the play are quite funny. His message comes through the use of images involving Picasso's sons Paulo and Claude, who are never seen older than four in his paintings, and the melancholy portraits of his father.

"Although Picasso doesn't come out of this as a particularly noble son or a very effective father, in fact quite the opposite, what does come out of this is his genius. Through the magic of his paintings the narrator begins to understand his own position and do something about it. His paintings do have the power to transform our lives," Mike says. He defends some of the artist's disloyalty to his family and female companions as a result of Picasso retaining a childlike approach which transformed the way he viewed the world.

"His images are summoned up by us in different ways. There's only one painting on stage but in the case of one of his sons sitting there wearing a harlequin's suit, I don't have the painting but I have the suit. We use lots of theatrical devices because Darlington Arts Cente doesn't have adequate insurance for us to bring the real things with me. I had to leave them at home," he says with a roar of laughter.