And like Flaxman’s plain penmanship, the Caulfield manner wasn’t exactly personal.A thick black line, always of the same, steady thickness, defines each object and detail. It’s a style that stresses and isolates things; or rather, insulates It’s a world made snug; outline as lagging It’s also a world made equal. An advert could use it, confident that most people would recognise it, even if they couldn’t name its creator. A bit of Leger, a bit of Mondrian, a bit of Minoan fresco and commercial illustration combined to produce the most distinctive British graphic since John Flaxman’s neo-Greek outline drawings two centuries ago.

In his mid- twenties, in the early Sixties, he invented a style that became proverbial. But, of course, that’s likely also to mean a privately-owned environment. (Leaf through the Hayward’s catalogue, and note which pictures are in private hands: those are the Caulfields in proper homes.) So what about public honour? And public access?Good questions. After all, Caulfield is something of a public favourite, a one-time “pop” artist who really was. Caulfield’s art requires a quasi-domestic, non-art environment to work in – and this is an interesting thing about it. There are nearly four decades of painting on show at the Hayward Gallery, and his name has been famous for most of them. It’s bad luck that his pictures aren’t designed for their own company.Their un-retrospect-ability needn’t reflect badly on them, though.

A retrospective is the standard way of honouring an artist of Caulfield’s years and achievement. Or some of the pictures will even start to look, by comparison, a bit messy.
This is just bad luck. And so to hang a Caulfield in an art gallery, a gallery moreover where all the other objects around it are themselves other pictures by Caulfield – obviously, the effect will be lost You’ll get a total neatness stalemate. It should probably hang in the sort of space that Caulfield’s art has made its own: restaurants, foyers, the modern office or apartment It should hang singly. A Patrick Caulfield retrospective misses the point, I think. The main point of any Caulfield picture is that it should be the neatest thing in the room.

Wherever it hangs, a Caulfield provides its surroundings with a kind of ideal focus; holds up to them a dream-image of clarity and tidiness. But in the usual four weeks’ rehearsal, even he cannot bring a company through a piece as stylistically demanding as this.To 6 March (box office 0161-236 7110). David Fielder, as the anarchic Azdak, forever nursing a dog-end in his palm, scuttles over the stage like a demented but unkillable tarantula.Fourteen actors and two musicians for Brecht in these times seem untold riches, and Chris Honer’s pertinacity and vision are admirable. The essential lightness and speed are, so far, lacking (I saw a preview).Yet Kati Williamson’s clear Grusha is consistently involving, and Rachel Smith’s screeching and fluttering as the Governor’s Wife does make stylisation work. Predominantly white and, in Ace McCarron’s decisive shafts of side-lighting, so striking against the dark background, the costumes mix peasant layering and kabuki voluminousness in a way that makes the actors seem cumbersome, and the stage cluttered. But we wait half the play for Azdak, and meanwhile Grusha’s perilous flight, pursued by the Ironshirts, is composed of instructive episodes and a series of minor characters.It is here that Brecht’s “speech” is most to be heeded, but unfortunately hardly any accurate observation is in evidence that would individualise the characters.