The contrast between the first two
phases of Katie Mitchell’s production is thrilling. As a curtain-raiser
to his main work, Simon Stephens has written a condensed version of
Jarry’s
Ubu Roi, which is
presented as a rumbustious Punch-and-Judy-style puppet show lasting ten
minutes or so. This is followed by two interpreters sitting in a booth,
reciting the full indictments against Ubu in what we infer is a trial
at one of the modern international tribunals. The differences between
absurdity and gravitas, misrule and procedure, energy and aridity are
borne in powerfully.
But there is one further difference which continues through the
following hour and a bit: that between showing and telling. It becomes
gradually apparent that this recitation is to be the principal mode of
the evening; only a clutch of brief sidelight scenes show us the
accused Ubu, his jailer and counsel directly. The rest is all recounted
by Kate Duchêne and Nikki Amuka-Bird into their desk microphones,
punctuated by (wonderfully executed) time-lapse sequences to indicate
the trial’s duration of over 400 days.
All kinds of arguments can be made for this staging of what, in
Stephens’ published script, is a more or less straight courtroom drama.
There is a point to reducing the two extremes of grotesquerie, the
exuberant and the grim, to the same perspective of indirect reportage;
it may lead us to interrogate why our responses to such disparate
material are so similar. It may suggest that reducing such enormities,
whether the fictitious ones in the former kingdom of Baleshnik or the
real ones in the likes of Liberia and the former Yugoslavia, to theatre
is grotesque in itself. It may parody the recent vogue for “tribunal”
plays at the Tricycle Theatre and elsewhere. And these are all
substantial points, but ultimately they all pale beside the reality
that is the resultant theatrical tedium.
Stephens has become a vocal champion of directors’ rights to interpret
dramatic texts in the most radical, deconstructive ways, and Mitchell
has over the past decade become a keen practitioner of taking work to
pieces and showing us the components, but there comes a point when the
result stops actually being theatre. This is not, to use the vogue
phrase, “post-dramatic”; it is anti-dramatic. All right, so this
presentation challenges us; well, then, we may challenge it back, and
for me it fails that reciprocal test.
Written for the Financial
Times.