Alfred Jarry wrote Ubu Roi in 1888 when he was a schoolboy of 15 and it was performed by marionettes. King Ubu, the cowardly, stupid and cruel despot who invades Poland and goes on a murderous spree, was based on his detested physics teacher.
Jarry, a forerunner of the surreal movement, heralded the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty. His anarchic play, ridiculing petit bourgeois morality and naturalistic theatre, is puerile and scatological, offering a mixture of music hall vulgarity, pantomime, ad-lib and parodies of Shakespeare and opera. It had its first professional performance in 1896 when he was 23. Fermin Gremier, who played Ubu, modelled his performance on Jarry’s bizarre, staccato way of speaking. The first word of dialogue on stage was Merdre! There were disturbances throughout the auditorium. The audience was divided between those who booed and whistled and those who cheered and applauded; both extremes were actively egged on by Jarry’s friends. The play was not acted again until after his early death in 1907, aged 34, from drug and alcoholic abuses.
Declan Donnellan, artistic director of Cheek by Jowl, has found an original way of doing it. The action now takes place in an elegantly creamy middle class sitting/dining room and is seen through the imagination and cam recorder of a teenage boy during a dinner party. All the characters in the play are acted by his parents, their three guests and himself. (The boy could be a modern teenage Jarry.) It is the sudden changes in their behaviour from bourgeois respectability and polite banal conversation to frenzied, grotesque and gruesome savagery and back again which is so funny. The props include a lampshade for a crown, a lavatory brush for a sceptre and a roll of kitchen foil for money. Donnellan’s production, performed in French with Christophe Gregoire as Ubu, is so much more interesting than Jarry’s play.