Ubu Roi - Playbill - July 2015

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Cheek by Jowl’s Ubu Roi

by David Clarke

A Deliciously Discomforting Dinner Party

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LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2015 CHEEK BY JOWL’S UBU ROI

Sometimes called the first absurdist and surrealist play, Alfred Jarry’s bizarre and comic Ubu Roi incited such an uproar when it premiered

on December 10, 1896, at Paris’ Théâtre de l’Oeuvre that it closed that same night. In the opening night audience was Irish poet William Butler Yeats who instantly recognized the play’s revolutionary significance. Satirizing greed and power and castigating the bourgeoisie’s wealth-fueled complacency, Jarry’s rarely-produced piece is given fresh life in Cheek by Jowl’s viscerally shocking production.

In 2009, Cheek by Jowl’s co-artistic directors Declan Donnellan (director) and Nick Ormerod (designer) took Lincoln Center Festival by storm with their sold-out performances and critically acclaimed run of Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, created for the Chekhov International Theatre Festival. The duo has been dedicated to staging brilliant and original productions of plays that emphasize the actor’s art since creating their company in 1981. Following their first season in London, Cheek by Jowl won the Laurence Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer in 1986, and more than half of the

company’s plays for that season also received Olivier awards. Now, the celebrated company produces work in English, French, and Russian and has impressed audiences on six continents, and more than 50 countries.

Cheek by Jowl began their foray into French theater when Peter Brook invited Donnellan and Ormerod to assemble a group of French actors in 2007, resulting in a French language production of Jean Racine’s Andromaque. The company had done an English language production of the play in 1985, but this internationally successful French language staging laid the groundwork for continued experimentation in French theater.

Ubu Roi will remind audiences of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with hints of Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III, and The Winter’s Tale. Jarry runs the familiar tropes of these works through a blender and mixes in the absolute worst of grotesque human nature, delivering a buffet of sophomoric humor lurking behind a thin veil of sophistication. With Ubu Roi, Jarry planted the seeds for absurdist theater and the surrealist movement that would emerge in art and literature.

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SCENE FROM CHEEK BY JOWL’S UBU ROI

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2015 CHEEK BY JOWL’S UBU ROI

David Clarke is the Editor-in-Chief of Theatrical Recordings and a contributor to BroadwayWorld.com, Out Magazine’s Out.com and Houston Press’ Art Attack blog.

Ubu Roi is co-produced by Cheek by Jowl with Barbican, London, Les Gémeaux/Sceaux/Scène Nationale and Comédie de Béthune, Centre Dramatique National Nord/Pas-de-Calais.

Ubu Roi is a presentation of Lincoln Center Festival 2015.

Lincoln Center Festival is a presentation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Lincoln Center Festival lead support is provided by American Express.

Major support provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Lincoln Center Festival 2015 presentation of Ubu Roi is made possible in part by generous support from The Grand Marnier Foundation and Sharp Fund PLD at The New York Community Trust.

For tickets and information, visit LincolnCenterFestival.org

The contemporary setting highlights the continued relevancy of Jarry’s observations.

In the play, Mère Ubu convinces her husband, Père Ubu, to murder the King of Poland. The Queen of Poland and her son flee to a remote cave, where the queen suddenly dies. Ghosts of the dead implore the son to avenge the deaths of his father and mother. Meanwhile, Père Ubu, now king, has become a monstrous dictator—glibly killing off his people and stealing their money. He is completely self-absorbed and ignorant of others’ suffering, leaving him blind to the machinations at work to dethrone him.

To give power and contemporary resonance to the themes of Jarry’s original work, Donnellan and Ormerod set their production in a cream colored, modern French dining room ready to receive dinner guests. We see the action of Ubu Roi through the lens of an angst-addled teenager who witnesses the plot unfold through the actions of his parents and their

guests. The show opens with him on a couch, scowling into a video camera, which adds a layer of intriguing voyeurism to the show by projecting startling close-ups against the back wall of the performance space. Like the cynical Jarry, who crafted Ubu Roi in part as an observation of arrogant teachers at his lycée, the teenage boy peels back the sophisticated veneer of his parents and their guests’ lives to show that people at heart are driven by savage impulses. Through the boy’s eyes, and the brute physicality of the production’s movement direction, the façade of civilized decorum explodes.

In the hands of Cheek by Jowl, this “wickedly funny and endlessly inventive” (Financial Times) production of Ubu Roi is simultaneously unsettling and entertaining. Updating the production to a modern setting doesn’t impede the 119 year-old play’s stirring, potent criticisms of humanity. Instead, the contemporary setting highlights the continued relevancy of Jarry’s observations.

Ubu Roi is at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, July 22–26.

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SCENE FROM CHEEK BY JOWL’S UBU ROI

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