Cheek by Jowl's production of Ubu Roi, directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod, is set in a modern French dining room. It tells the story of Père and Mère Ubu manipulating events to murder the King of Poland so Père can become king himself. Through the eyes of an angsty teenager witnessing the plot unfold through his parents and their dinner guests, the production peels back the veneer of civilized decorum to reveal savage human impulses. While originally shocking audiences in 1896 with its satire of greed and power, the contemporary setting highlights how Jarry's observations remain relevant today in critiquing humanity.

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Cheek by Jowl’s Ubu Roi
by David Clarke
A Deliciously
Discomforting
Dinner Party
Photo:JohanPersson2013

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LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2015 CHEEK BY JOWL’S UBU ROI
S
ometimes 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.
Photo:JohanPersson2013
SCENE FROM CHEEK BY JOWL’S UBU ROI

3. 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.
Photo:JohanPersson2013
SCENE FROM CHEEK BY JOWL’S UBU ROI
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