Declan Donnellan's gift as the veteran director of Cheek By Jowl is usually in subtraction; he shaves down Shakespeare and Chekhov classics to their bare essentials, relying on the actors and the text to reach parts that other directors don't reach. But with this production in French, as with his recent 'Tis Pity She's A Whore in English, he seems to be entering new territory, adding more than he takes away.
Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, staged in 1896, is a historical landmark, not just for French theatre but for all European culture. It's a large hand grenade lobbed at 19th century aesthetics, and a precursor of the modernist age that dawned in music, painting and literature a decade later. It's a crude, absurdist, scatological farce designed deliberately 'pour epater les bourgeois'. But its ability to shock audiences today is zero; what Donnellan has cleverly done instead is develop the work by adding a whole new level.
The opening, like that of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, which also played in the Barbican's Silk Street theatre, is deliberately slow and undramatic, with a single character on stage. This time it's a teenager lounging on a sofa and playing with a video camera that projects images on the back wall of the set, as France Inter broadcasts an evening radio news bulletin. We're in a comfortable bourgeois Parisian apartment, where preparations for a dinner party are under way. As the teenager heads backstage, he projects more pictures: a man chopping tomatoes in the kitchen, a woman dressing in front of a mirror, a white toilet with smears of shit. The camera zooms in and out, creating surreal, absurdist images that foreshadow the violent action of the rest of the play.
The couple hosting the dinner emerge from backstage, and the guests start to arrive. There's a round of Parisian bisous on the cheek, and a few moments of conversation that we can't quite hear. Suddenly, the lighting changes, the teenager leaps up from the sofa with a feral glare and the man and the woman are transformed. Their movements are no longer under control, and they jerk and squirm around. The feral boy is like Ariel or Puck, one of the many Shakespearean elements in Jarry's play that Donnellan develops. Underneath bourgeois life lurks something much nastier, which is exposed when the surface is cracked open. The middle class dinner party is a kind of framing device for the story of the disgusting Pere Ubu and his equally unpleasant wife Mere Ubu, who get caught up in a quasi-Shakespearean revenge drama. Like Macbeth, Ubu murders to gain the throne. As in King Lear, he gouges out the eye of one of his foes. Like Richard III, he despatches his opponents to execution without a second thought. And as in Hamlet, the stage ends up littered with bodies.
Donnellan's economical style of direction and his long partnership with designer Nick Ormerod mean that every physical detail has been calibrated. The chaos on stage is carefully controlled, and there are moments when the six actors suddenly resume their seats at the dinner table for polite conversation. Then the bourgeois surface splinters apart again, and more mayhem ensues. I particularly enjoyed the sight of two characters dancing to a recording of Charles Trenet's La Mer -- a surreal sequence that worked perfectly. One of Donnellan's gifts is that he understands that in the theatre, less is generally more.
In this kind of play the actors can't delve deeply into character; what they can and do deliver is a fierce and uncompromising commitment to the director's vision. Christophe Gregoire plays Pere Ubu with extraordinary vigour and the Moscow-trained Camille Cayol -- who was in Donnellan's excellent Russian-language Three Sisters in 2007 is excellent as Mere Ubu. I also liked the cat-like ferocity of Sylvain Levitte as Bougrelas.
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