“School-boy humour” tends to get a bad press. But where would theatre be without it? As a golden opportunity arises to watch Cheek by Jowl’s acclaimed production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi from the comfort of your computer screen – seize it! – it feels only right to bow and scrape a bit before Jarry’s seminal act of juvenile disrespect.
On the 10th December 1896, in Paris, this five-act comedy in which a mad-cap Macbeth-like couple called Ma and Pa Ubu gain, then lose, the Polish throne in a frenzy of stupidity, venality and treachery, caused a right old stink.
A riot, albeit one part-instigated by its young author – who wanted as much booing as cheering – greeted its cavalier disregard for bourgeois niceties and naturalistic conventions, beginning with what is now one of the most notorious opening lines in modern drama: “Merdre”, or as the Methuen-published translation playfully puts it: “Pschitt!”
“After us the savage god,” WB Yeats, who was in the audience, wrote that night, as if he’d witnessed the dawn of a new era. It’s a matter beyond dispute that this one work – the basis of which was an 1888 sketch penned for marionettes, and domestic consumption, by the then adolescent Jarry – opened artistic flood-gates even if, in its own terms, it was something of a cul-de-sac (the further Ubu plays he wrote up to his death in 1907 added to the overall corpus but had little of the same impact). Jarry’s influence on the continent – on surrealism, futurism, Dadaism, and the post-war “theatre of the Absurd” too – is widely acknowledged. Picasso was a big admirer. And on this side of the Channel, do we get NF Simpson or the Goons without him? I wonder.
Simon Stephens's 2012 reimagining of Ubu in The Trial of Ubu (Photo: Alastair Muir)
The scale of the work’s legacy can undo its bequest of rebellious insouciance however – inspiring reverence when the template it laid down was to kick against the rules. “Ubu” also has the power to enervate and in the wrong hands can become insufferable. Charles Spencer, reviewing The Trial of Ubu, a 2012 bid by Simon Stephens to marry Jarry with modern-day concerns about war crimes, railed: “His work has always struck me as being juvenile, tiresome and lamentably unfunny.”
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The virtue of this Cheek by Jowl production, performed in French, is that it confines the body of the drama to middle-class quarters the better to emphasise its qualities of seething mutiny. Instead of attempting the logistically impossible epic – Jarry’s dramatis personae include “the entire” Russian and Polish armies – we have six actors in search of the violent, original Oedipal spirit of the piece.
Locating everything within an asphyxiating, sterile, luxury apartment, through which prowls the malcontent teenage son of a pair of smug dinner-party hosts (whom the boy’s vandalising imagination transforms into the rampantly horrible Ma and Pa Ubu), Donnellan lends it the air of an unforgiving satire on deranging modern manners.
As I noted in my review, even if the scatological puerility is honoured (the lad takes delight in videoing a toilet-bowl) there’s darkness visible too: “While we’re invited to laugh at the faux carnage that’s unleashed with infantile invention – a food-mixer used to drill inside skulls, a gouged eyeball served up as a tasty morsel – the larkiness conveys a frisson because there are families whose members can flip in a way that’s far from hilarious.” It might sound “un peu de trop” to argue that Ubu Roi can still be a play for today, but by dusting it down, and reframing it thus, that’s exactly what it is.
Cheek By Jowl's production of Ubu Roi will be streamed live via the Telegraph website at 7pm on Sunday 26th July. It is filmed in the Gerald W Lynch Theater as part of the 2015 Lincoln Center Festival.
