He was one of the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20th century, churning out more than 20,000 pieces of art during his lifetime, including paintings, sculptures, engravings, drawings and ceramics. But this week, a different side of Pablo Picasso is on show: the playwright.

Sixty-six years after he wrote it, Picasso’s little-known play Desire Caught by the Tail is being staged in his native Spain for the first time - and for its first important worldwide run. The play had been read in wartime Paris in 1944, by a sampling of Picasso’s famous friends, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. But, barring a few minor productions in the original French or translated into English, it faded largely into obscurity.

Fans of the painter have tried for years to stage it in Spain, but many said it was simply too difficult. The surrealistic play has almost no plot and is far from easy to perform. The original was written in a three-day burst in automatic style, without any punctuation.

The action takes place in a single room in Nazi-occupied Paris, where a group of artists takes refuge from deprivation through sex, cooking and poetry. As one might expect from a Picasso play, the dialogue is abstract and the action mostly absurd. Monologues go on for pages.

"One of the strangest things I’ve read," concludes the only reviewer on Amazon.com. "This play is very weird."

The cast of characters includes Thin and Fat Anxiety, Big Foot, Silence, Curtains, Onions and The Two Doggies (Dialogue: "Bowie, Wowie"). Stage directions call for "potatoes frying in sizzling oil", with smoke "progressively filling the theatre until it is utterly impossible to breathe".

In another scene, a female actress is directed to urinate on-stage for ten minutes. To achieve this remarkable feat, Picasso is said to have made the actress drink litres of tea and cherry infusion. This infamous scene has been retained for the play’s planned five-month run at threatres in cities including Granada and Malaga. "It remains exactly as it is," said Dolores Caballero, the director. "Only we haven’t had to rely on tea or cherry infusions. The scene is constructed in a special way that facilitates the work of the actress," she said cryptically.

Spanish reviewers have yet to pass comment on the play. The director said that he had kept other scenes seen as tough on the audience, including an orgy and "the moment in which the protagonist decides to remove her corns". "We haven’t lightened anything," she said.

Ms Caballero said that the actors had found it difficult to recreate Picasso’s vision on stage, but many of them felt they understood Picasso’s paintings better as a result, she said.

Not everyone has been a fan of Picasso’s theatre. The American writer Gertrude Stein reportedly told Picasso that he should go back to painting, but the artist took his writing at least as seriously as his painting. "Materially, I dedicated the same time to both activities," he is reported to have said once, joking that: "Perhaps one day, when I have disappeared, I will be described in the following way, 'Pablo Ruiz Picasso: poet and playwright. Some paintings by him are still preserved'."

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