Ubu Roi:

by Alfred Jarry. VUW Drama Society. Directed by Jim Spalding. Reviewed by Martin Edmond.

When we get bored we make charades. If we have the time and the meant, we do it with style, using costumes, make-up, props etc. And if, furthermore, we are intelligent and of faultless pedigree, those extras may convince us we mean something by the charade and we then persuade our audience to applaud our act. It is a strange process whereby what was unequivocally, a kick in the face, becomes in its turn a collection of faces pleading for kicks; but this is the history the production of Ubu Roi bears witness to. Yeats, following the notorious 1896 premiere, was moved to comment; 'After us the savage God'. The news from Memorial Theatre is, God has altogether lost his savagery and his being too, and that in his absence his creatures play pretty games. I would not mind so much if these people had not used a text which still has in it the stuff from which real theatre is made. Drama Society has already abused and misused Becket's 'Waiting for Godot'. Here they merely continue their jolly romp around the body of modern theatre, forgetting that without due respect, the body may become a corpse. It is a production which rests more on the assumption of Jarry's genius than any of the plays he wrote; it works with the pretensions of the avant-garde rather than with the real conflicts that have, occasionally made an avant-garde necessary. In a word, it short circuits itself, tipping its cap to both author and audience with an equally earnest desire to gratify.

'Ubu Roi' itself is a kind of marriage of the sublime and the ridiculous, a schoolboy fantasy given free rein down the corridors of high finance and power. Ubu, up on his financial horse, farts and flusters his way into any hall that is the least bit hallowed, leaving after him his incorrigible stink. He is anarchic, he is grotesque, he is even terrifying, in that there is a crazy logic in all he does — the thing that made Cyril Connolly call him 'the Santa Clans of the Atomic Age'. But he is not, finally, a buffoon and nor is he much fin. He's funny, of course, but that's not quite the same thing. It is here that I would locate the basic fault in the production. Jim Spalding Charlie Moore, who played Ubu, and almost everyone else in the cast, thought they were playing a knock-about farce and playing it for laughs. In so doing, they entirely lost that element of the sinister and the grotesque which is what makes the Ubu plays the masterpieces they are. It is worth remembering that the play was first conceived for puppet theatre, I believe that for any production of it to succeed, that kind of stylisation must be somehow incorporated. Puppets, as Ted Hughes has it, 'are deeper than our own reality: the more human they look and act, the more elemental they seem.' This cast, with one or two exceptions, were people first — scrubbed and cheerful at that — and characters either second or not at all. Even the numerous parodies of various notable set pieces (particularly from Shakespeare) that the play contrives, are allowed to pass with barely a nod; and from a university cast, probably all English students! The one player who deserves mention is Murray Gadd as Boggerlas. He did at times realise the world of insane double-standards in which : he had found himself. And perhaps Philippa Campbell's Mere Ubu would have impressed me had I not seen her play exactly the same role in that ill-starred 'Waiting for Godot'.

Since I believe the show was spoiled by a basic misunderstanding of the play (if it was not a refusal to understand) it is difficult to give praise to those aspects which were well-executed. I mean, the costumes and the make-up were excellent, the music always apt and sometimes genuinely funny, and the stage design generally clever in conception, if not in application. These technical accomplishments cried out for something to support or complement and they did not find it. The programme notes are nothing more than gratuitous cock-sucking, entirely nauseating. Jarry spins in his pint-sized grave, unredeemed.