Ubu Roi – Barbican (Cheek by Jowl), London

 

For those of you who, like me, have never seen a Cheek by Jowl production, or an Albert Jarry play for that matter, Ubu Roi is a shock to the system.  The original play opened and closed on the 10th of December 1896, following an opening night riot which led to it being outlawed (ah, Paris…).  The farcical text foreshadows surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd, and layered onto this, the Cheek by Jowl production creates a beige, bourgeois Parisian world in which the events of the play itself take place in the imagination of a disaffected teenage son at a dinner party.

 

In the clever (if uncomfortably long) opening sequence, he explores the world of his parents’ apartment with a handheld camera, exposing to the audience more than they would otherwise see and cleverly opening up a larger space without the use of moving or open walls.  It is his parents being overly affectionate that pushes him into an Oedipal fantasy world, in which the three of them and their guests act out the story of selfish greed that is Ubu Roi, including regicide, torture, war, large-scale slaughter and the impersonating of archangels.

The playful direction and design of the production lifted what I imagine would be a difficult play as originally intended into a real delight for the audience.  The humour of the wordplay and puns of the text were nicely offset by the repurposing of household items into the world of the mad king, and the contrast with the civilised dinner party conversation made the whole thing genuinely funny.  This was a touring production, having originally been at the Barbican last year with seemingly almost all the same cast, but was still very fresh, and well worth seeing.  The surtitling was good enough to mean that non-French speakers were not disadvantaged, and seemingly a good time was had by all, if the lack of a riot as the curtain fell is anything to go by.