Everything and Nothing: Alfred Jarry's 'Ubu Roi.'

By Ewan Stuart

Ubu Roi is a fantastically orchestrated tour-de-force. That's a pretty provocative way to start a review... but there is no other way to express it. Ubu Roi is the kind of theatre that actors love to make and that audiences love to watch. Now I’ll tell you why... and I guarantee you will be confused.

Alfred Jarry (the author of several Ubu related works) began to collate his various tales of ‘Ubu’ from as young as 14, and it seems as if this is the springboard Declan Donnellan (Cheek by Jowl’s Artistic Director) uses to kick start his new production.

The teenage son of a wealthy French couple (swaddled in their ivory tower) reacts against his parents and reality becomes fractured for him. Inside his abstraction he casts his mother and father as Mère and Père Ubu, an ambitious duo who plot to kill the King and make their riches in the process. Imagine it a little like Macbeth, but instead of a dagger he’s clutching a hand blender instead. Confused? It’s all part of this fractured reality, the inspiration of a bored creative mind, and at any rate try not to let the story get in the way as it really doesn’t matter one iota as much as the presentation!

Donnellan plays with this fractured reality and very deliberately juxtaposes the hushed small talk of supper with guests, against the anarchic shrieks and savage movements of the world of Ubu, and he does it with immense panache. Style over substance... perhaps, but it’s not an easy feat, the actors play with vigour and sincerity to achieve this seemingly simple effect, and it never gets tired, in an instant Donnellan uses it to highlight the drama, in another he’ll have you rolling in the aisles. Theatrical conventions are set up and then obliterated with reckless abandon – “he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this” – you tell yourself, but he does it with such charm that you just can’t bring yourself to stop him.

Donnellan also manages to imbue the production with pertinence using the work to meditate on the chaotic nature of our own existence, he alludes to the animalistic nature of our sexual relationships; our greed; incest; there are flashes of everything in here.

Cheek by Jowl’s production of Alfred Jarry’s surrealist work will bowl you over with its astute flamboyance at every turn and Donnellan sets himself apart as one of the most intelligent and creative directors in modern theatre. Ubu Roi is an all encompassing work of mad genius, it is spectacle laced with violence, humour, drama and ambition. It’s exhausting! It is universal, nonsensical... in short it is everything and it is nothing.

For further information visit: http://www.cheekbyjowl.com/ubu_roi.php#calendar

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