Cheek by Jowl’s Ubu Roi

This play, it farts, it licks, it spits. Cheek by Jowl’s hugely successful Ubu Roi returns to the Barbican in all its decadence-smashing scrutiny.

An adolescent boy with a camera pans over dead meat and the extreme close-up is projected on the crème walls of a pristine dining room. A middle-aged couple swoops on stage arranging the dinner table, vases and pictures on the walls into perfect angles. It’s a flawless surface but underneath seethes a greed and lust irreconcilable with the immaculate image presented. The boy with the camera knows that the closer you look the more abominable the things you will uncover. What unfolds in the next two hours is a radical dissection of regal power and the futility of financial gain that is playful, shocking but also shockingly good.

Alfred Jarry’s fin-de-siècle piece Ubu Roi follows père Ubu and his wife (Camille Cayol as a Lady Macbeth-clone and Christophe Grégoire as the fool king) who plot to kill the current ruler Wenceslas of Poland (Romain Cottard). Together with his entourage Ubu takes over and then wrecks the kingdom with his arbitrary ruling and killings. The text at the first glance might not appear as transgressive as it did when it was originally performed in 1896 with audiences rioting when faced with the manic king and his depravity. Director Declan Donnellan found a way to make it relevant and startling again by paralleling the seemingly amorality-affirming, carnevalesque piece with the setting of a bourgeois French dinner party.

Switching back and forth to much comedic effect the two worlds are woven together expertly. The boy’s initial camera exploration for example exposes faecal stains on an off-stage bathroom rug the usurper king will wear later at his coronation. And there are other inventive uses of everyday household goods that serve as props. A loo brush serves the king as a sceptre and a cleaning spray bottle becomes a deadly weapon to defend from attacks. It becomes clear that only the young heir Bougrelas can stop the manic traitor Ubu. In a oedipal twist Sylvain Levitt, giving a forceful performance, doubles up as the young heir and the adolescent observing the party.

These depicted characters are of course only monarchs and dukes in cipher. With all its crassly comedic antics the pieces comes uncomfortably close to exposing the mechanism behind the kind of moral short-circuiting that happens on the striking surface where political and financial power kindle their destructive flames. There is a lovely, simple line the king utters which translates from the original French the piece is performed into “I’m going to kill everyone and then… and then… I’ll go away.” Nick Ormerod’s white-washed, open design provides the literal canvas under which nothing remains hidden and which, after the performance, is left in a state of utter anarchy. Ketchup on the walls, food on the floor, furniture upturned – a perfect representation of the destructive effects of Ubu’s power hunger driven by an eternal “just because”.

Under the pressure and violence of this absurd figure language becomes more and more precarious and consonants start to slip and move about. “Merde” becomes “merdre”,  “finance” turns into “phynance” – a kind of absurd spluttering and tottering reflective of the corrupted political structure the play concerns itself with. In the alternate world dinner party world distinguishable language is completely absent altogether.

This piece celebrates the absurd and pulls out all the stops, it’s visceral, provoking and a joy to watch.