The Trial of Ubu

This has been a pretty great theatre year so far and we’re only a month in. Nick Payne’s tremendous Constellations, about which I must write, is a thoughtful, precise, funny and exuberantly melancholy piece of work. Nancy Harris’s Our New Girl isn’t perfect but she’s got a really strong voice and keeps us guessing and switching. I loved 1927‘s Animals and Children Take to the Streets and now we have the wonderful thing that is The Trial of Ubu.

The evening falls into two parts. Almost as a curtain-raiser, we begin with a cut-down Ubu the King, played as is traditional as a puppet show, in a new version by Simon Stephens. It’s raucous and funny and brutal. It’s very familiar (this is the Ubu we all know) and it’s expertly done and feels fresh and new. But that’s about fifteen minutes of the performance. We then move onto The Trial of Ubu.

The Trial of Ubu follows the proceedings of a war-crimes trial, with Ubu accused of various crimes, asked to account for a mass grave, and so on. We get a little glimpse of Ubu in his cell and the behaviour of the prosecutors.

The play is boring. It’s dull and deliberately, thrilling so. The horror of the events described has been filtered into judicial procedures; the affect has been stripped from them. It’s a matter of evidence and testimony. It is the anti-Ubu. The original play is all outrage and horror and offence and grotesquerie; the events described are foolish, impossible, not to be taken seriously. The Trial of Ubu has none of the outrage and all of the taking-it-seriously. It’s quite brilliantly done. For one thing, of course, by removing the affect from the performance, we are forced to supply it as the audience. The baroque horrors of Ubu’s death pit are chilling because of the normality with which they are described.

But Katie Mitchell has gone a step further. Rather than stage the trial itself, we are watching a pair of translators, simultaneously rendering the proceedings into English. Their job is simply to transfer the semantic contents from one language to another and they add yet another level of flatness, of jarring disaffection to proceedings. The details of the trial also compete with the detail of the translators: their clothes, their relationship, their techniques, their own moods. Indeed, we feel that there is another story being told here: they at times seem to be moved or horrified by what they are translating, having to pass on the baton to the other because of the strength of what they have heard; but also they seem to have some kind of relationship themselves, which goes through some kind of crisis towards the end of the performance. As a result, we experience a kind of profound dislocation, the data about these atrocities at one end of the communicative journey and the corresponding (or possibly corresponding) emotions at the other end. At times, we fast-forward through portions of the testimony and watch the two translators as if on a video, their sitting positions and head movements adjusting abruptly. We are caught - well, I was caught - between both enjoying the rendering of that video experience and finding something emotionally angular in their jerking, flinching movements, as if the air were full of needles.

What this did for me was radically to defamiliarise Ubu. One of the most famous pieces of theatrical outrage, Ubu Roi has softened a bit. I loved the Graeae production in the 1990s, Jamie Beddard’s Ubu a foul, spittle-flecked, roaring tyrant, a real grotesque who raised all sorts of atavistic feelings in me about disability and bodily control that made it an edgy night at Oval House that has stayed with me for years. But that was an exceptions. David Greig’s version for Dundee played BITE a few years ago and while I loved the pugnacious translation, the production seemed a bit panto. It’s lost its power to shock, for me, and the first fifteen minutes were the shocking version that I knew I was comfortable with. But the second half brought everything foul about the play into focus - so that the moment where a screen slides away to show us Ubu in his cell, looking every inch the puppet monster from the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre 110 years ago, was like being introduced to Ratko Mladić at a dinner party.

A stunning start to the year.