Scene Change: Marc Chagall at Tate Liverpool

Why has there never been a stage production of Marc Chagall's life? He would make an intriguing protagonist, and there was more than enough drama in his 97 years. In his paintings, cows could fly upside down on invisible wire, and when you look at his works, you can almost hear the score. There are love stories (his first wife Bella and two subsequent wives), and life-long passions and obsessions, including, well, the theatre itself – particularly in his home town of Vitebsk in Russia, where he would regularly design costumes and sets for the Vitebsk Theatre of Revolutionary Satire (TEREVSAT).

As the viewer progresses through the rooms of Tate Liverpool's current exhibition, Chagall: Modern Master – and by proxy, through the artist's life – it becomes obvious that Chagall and his paintings had a special relationship to the theatre. He wasn't alone in crossing over between fine art and the stage: Picasso produced his first set design in 1917; the Futurists outlined their 'Futurist theatre' in their manifesto of 1914, and Kasimir Malevich designed the set for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun in 1913. But the difference with Chagall, as evidenced here, is that he used paint as though he were a playwright, set designer and director all at once, opting for shallow picture planes, depicting rooms bursting with layers of action, telling vivid – if nonsensical – narratives and, as the show's co-curator Stephanie Straine says, achieving “a synthesis between figuration and abstraction.” In his works, almost 3D human beings stand in symbolically loaded sets.

Modern Master plots the artist's journey through one of the most important decades of his career. After some travelling, he settled in 1911 aged 24 in the critical and avant-garde hub of Paris – despite, says Straine, not knowing the language. It was for this reason that he was so productive, focusing initially on his painting and only later on becoming a conduit between critics, poets, the literary elite and artists. In the first rooms, we see much that is familiar. This is partly because, as with many of his fellow modern artists, we have seen a lot of Chagall's work in reproduction over the years, but it's also because he borrows from other artists – Renoir, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, the Delaunays – as though he's producing a series of collages or sketchbooks; there's even a painting that would look at home in the pages of the Kama Sutra. In Homage to Apollinaire, Chagall has written the names of some of his social circle over a background that is strikingly Delaunay-esque (Sonia and Robert both painted distinctive, circular abstract canvases). What is less obvious – until you see the same tortured, conjoined figure motif in Study for Adam and Eve or Homage to Apollinaire – is the Old Testament reference. In Jackie Wullschlager's biography of the artist, she quotes him as saying, “I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.”

“Chagall has been called ‘phantasmagorical’” – Stephanie Strainer

It doesn't take long to get used to the artist's tendency to anthropomorphise; for us to accept the animals with human faces and behaviours as and when they arise. In The Yellow Room, a cow appears to be saying something that's made its female human companion laugh her head off, while in the background, a man walks towards the door for some fresh air, or for a chat with the man in the moon. The table at which they are all positioned seems to be upturning, but it could be a perspectival device – either way, it keeps the whole scene moving.Nearby hang some of the most harrowing and dark images in the exhibition – the gothic and bloody Birth paintings, both versions of which show a newly born infant seemingly torn from its mother. In one, a shady character is seen exiting rapidly with a baby in his arms. Straine says it is unlikely that, as a young man, the artist would have been present at a birth, but suggests that these works could have been based on accounts he heard of his own dramatic entry to the world; allegedly while a fire raged in the town. “The Birth paintings inaugurate this very flexible approach to reality; he has been called 'phantasmagorical,'” she notes. The paintings are certainly dream-like, but at the same time, they retain the artist's “own painting system”, which is characterised by, well, characters, and a folkloric appearance that lends itself to narrative scenes and stands as homage to his Jewish heritage.

If anyone were to produce a play of Chagall's life, the second act would probably begin with the unexpected end to his period in Paris. What he imagined would be a brief visit to his native Russia to attend his sister's wedding in 1914 turned into eight years, as the onset of war prevented his return to France. His graphic pen and ink work during World War I is, Straine points out, more sombre and “numb” than the work that came before and after it; however, his output reveals he hadn't lost his ability to find the comic as well as the tragic within human interaction (chickens provide some light relief), and his return home meant he was reunited with – and then married to – Bella. About whether he had missed his fiancée during his years in Paris, the exhibition is vague. However, Chagall painted Bella often during their 30 years of marriage – and her death apparently left him grief stricken and unable to work for several months. In Promenade, he holds Bella's hand as she floats untethered like a helium balloon to the sky. This painting, if a little cheesy, looks and feels a lot like the sensation of love. Behind the figures, the landscape breaks up into shards, emphasising the characters' separation from the mundanities of life.

Before ending on a mixed-bag encore of later work – a sleepy landscape seen through an open window, a clock flying on one blue wing, a red spirit emerging from red rooftops, a ghostly party, a warring goat – we arrive, finally, in Chagall's 'Theatre of Dreams', where any numbness has lifted and been replaced with a confidence probably founded on the success and recognition the artist was beginning to receive in his professional life. Here, his musicality is more obvious, as figures contort and dance for him – and comprising the exhibition's finale are the murals he produced for the State Jewish Chamber Theatre in Moscow, where we see the end of a process of learning from other artists, and the realisation of both Chagall's ‘singular voice’ and its appropriate application in a theatrical context. The only disappointment is that not one of the canvases is hung from the ceiling to create the fully immersive experience that the artist intended – a display method dubbed, at the time, ‘Chagall's box’.

If this focus on the theatrical element of Chagall's work doesn't help you overcome the feeling that you've seen it all before, perhaps you will appreciate that his style anticipates the current interest in outsider art, or that his painterly joy in half-remembered narratives – particularly obvious in The Poet Reclining – lives on in artists like Peter Doig. But of course, if you don't fancy the exhibition, you could always wait for the stage show.