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A right royal send up
Camille Cayol as Queen Ubu and Christophe Grégoire (in lampshade) as Ubu Roi Pictures:Johan Persson Ubu Roi Cheek by Jowl Warwick Arts Centre
***** ALFRED Jarry
(1873-1907), author of the pioneering French play
Ubu Roi,
was just 34 when he died. He was even younger - a
mere 23 - when his most famous play,
Ubu Roi, turned its guns on
jumped-up despotism, years before Charlie Chaplin immortalised the art
with The Great Dictator
and Viktor Ullmann with his Theresienstadt opera
The Kaiser of Atlantis,
by presenting what looks mightily like a spoof version of
Shakespeare's
Macbeth and
Richard III. The megalomania, fantasy and apparitions (even a
Banquo-type march past), the blood-dripping Lady Macbeth figure, the
slaughter of innocent and guilty alike, are all there; and they figure
large and surreal in Declan Donnellan's stupendous new staging - as
bracing and rewarding as the best offerings of Simon McBurney's Theatre
Complicité - for the border-crossing, Laurence Olivier Award-winning
company Cheek by Jowl. The company is now more than 30 years old and
features a brilliant French team which will later be seen at several key
venues in North France. It's a novel, bright, original and – given
Jarry's influence on early 20th century figures such as
Apollinaire – Dadaist or Expressionistic staging, that not just evokes
but redoubles the terror, by casting it in an outwardly placid
‘domestic' context. Brutality on one's doorstep, one might say.
Hence the funniness and the ghastliness fuse. As
the partner French theatres point out, Donnellan's unusual treatment by
its sheer impudence underlines the universality of the dictatorial
instinct. It is, or could be, in all of us. The salivating bloodlust of
Ubu (the spectacularly good, lampshade hated, maniacal Christophe
Grégoire) and his seducing-into-evil wife (the fractionally too
comic/silly walks Camille Cayol, who appeared in Cheek by Jowl's Russian
language Three Sisters, and whose Russian-speaking performances
as a long-term member of Moscow's Tabakov theatre were something of a
sensation), lusting for the power and riches the once-powerful Polish
throne can offer, seems to well up from uncontrollable and almost
instantaneous gut urges: witness the (were it not so ghastly) hilarious
transformations of each character from the whispering midst of a civil
and urbane dinner party (only one seat unoccupied), into ghoulish,
Goyaesque grotesques. The effect is almost Monty Python, or, say, Billy
Liar, whose fantasies require the distorted personae of those around him
to feed on. Right at the outset, after an unexplained 20 minute delay to
the start, some ten minutes are devoted to following preparations around
the household, via a (projected) hand-held camera trotted about by the
son of the family, doubling as (or who is) Bougrelas, son of the deposed
monarch Wenceslas. The first changes of Ubu's character – monsieur into
monster – is initiated by the son (the almost as admirable Sylvain
Levitte), slouching telly-bound on the sofa like the classic 13 to 15
year old, gesturing a change to a slimy green light. He seems to be in
control. And indeed, by the end, as he pertly takes his place at the
table, that sensation is confirmed. Are all the antics the son's anti-adult
fantasies? Is it he who has the ruthless controlling instinct, even
though he visualises himself as the victorious Malcolm or Horatio, the
ailing country's salvation? Is it he who, as Donnellan explained in a
not very cleverly located pre-theatre talk in a resounding foyer,
provides the ‘anti-action'?
Levitte's initial sequence with the camera is too
long: an idea overegged, and easily trimmable. Yet it has the merit,
perhaps deliberate, of establishing an adagio, rather than allegro
tempo. With the sharp lighting tweaks, all the nauseous events that
follow, even when hot on each others' heels, seem to acquire a slow
motion, as in a strobed cinematic effect. A hint – not the only one - of
French cinema, perhaps. Once the initial swap – dinner party . . .
apocalyptic nightmare – has been witnessed, you might have thought the
idea would wear thin with repetition. Far from it. As the besuited Ubu,
needing less the coaxings of his wife gaining his own head of steam
(there are suggested comparisons with North African/Middle Eastern
dictators and so on, but Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu suggest a yet
better analogy from our own era, albeit her influence did not
wane), piles up the bodies (bankers, politicians, judiciary): ‘For my
kingdom's sake I've decided to liquidate the nobility' – now there maybe
is a modern coincidence - his rationality, rocky from the start,
loses all foundation. Murder thrives for its own sake. Like 12th
century Scotland, the very country weeps. This was a six-man cast, and all were very fine. Vincent de Bouard, almost as if he'd absorbed the very foundations of Tati era and later French comedy, played the doomed King Wenceslas as wittily as he did the zany, befurred Russian monarch who comes to Poland's, and the boy Bougrelas', aid – one might see him as a young Edward III reclaiming his stolen legacy – not without his own aggrandising intentions. Cécile Leterme enacts the other (not all) female characters with gusto. Just as successful, Xavier Boiffier, initially as the Buckingham to Grégoire's Crookback, later (like Leterme) in a plethora of parts: ambitious, cowed, then gutted in all senses. Plays are team events anyway, but against the
entertainingly laid-back dining table-cum-drawing room set by the
phenomenally talented Nick Ormerod, Cheek by Jowl's co-founder and joint
artistic director – he has designed almost every one of their
productions over three decades - emphasised by appetising whites and
lulling creams that just waited to be sullied (just possibily ‘the
visual poetry of suggestion, of material minimalism' which he has been
lauded for), this French équipe, strikingly well picked out
(Pascal Noël did the lights) and quite brilliantly, briskly directed –
no sign of a single slip in an impossibly fast-flowing dialogue – seemed
like a pretty polished, pucker ensemble. Little ironic bursts of music (Davy Sladek
supplied the elsewhere eerie, modernistic, threatening and at times
silently screaming background whinings) break into the action: Charles
Trenet's ‘La Mer' is just one such amusing diversion; there are
ample others.
Ubu Roi is a spoof. Jarry set out
to make himself, and others, laugh, and even more so at the age of 14-17
(was he the real Bougrelas?) when - as impossible as the young
Debussy was untameable - he enacted with his friends a scripted pastiche
of his teachers and institutions which yielded, substantially, the
foundations for his later play. It was staged in 1896; Frank Wedekind's Spring
Awakening, reviewed last week, was penned in the early 1890s (if not
at this point staged); Robert Musil was at school undergoing the
experiences that would produce Young Törless.
The desire to battle authority at that time was
all but as strong as it was in the late 1960s. Apollinaire, Mallarmé,
Satie, later Auric and Milhaud: all battled against practices, cultural
and artistic, they found laughable, unworkable and passé; nor
were they averse to parodying, mercilessly, other ‘-isms' of that era. Jarry, of part-Breton descent, was more than a
one-play playwright when the ubiquitous TB claimed him before the First
World War. His sense of surreal parody can be felt in his three other
plays, all relating to or advancing the Ubu theme. There were novels too
– just as trenchant as the stage works. Like Apollinaire, he was one of
the great teasers, and Declan Donnellan has echoed that in producing not
just a most teasing, but a truly inspiring, and also quietly demanding
production: one in which the merd(r)e (which didn't
go down too well with the 1896 audience) really flies. Even in French, with subtitles, is Ubu
worth seeking out and paying to see? You bet
Roderic Dunnett Tues 5 Sat 9 Feb
Oxford Playhouse (www.oxfordplayhouse.com
01865 305305). 14 Feb - 6 Apr touring
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