The Trial of Ubu, Hampstead Theatre, London

Rob Ostlere as the Jailor and Paul McCleary as Ubu

The contrast between the first two phases of Katie Mitchell’s production is thrilling. As a curtain-raiser to his main work, Simon Stephens has written a condensed version of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, which is presented as a rumbustious Punch and Judy-style puppet show lasting 10 minutes or so. This is followed by two interpreters sitting in a booth, reciting the full indictments against Ubu in what we infer is a trial at one of the modern international tribunals. The differences between absurdity and gravitas, misrule and procedure, energy and aridity are borne in powerfully.

But there is one further difference that continues through the following hour and a bit: that between showing and telling. It becomes gradually apparent that this recitation is to be the principal mode of the evening; only a clutch of brief sidelight scenes show us the accused Ubu, his jailer and counsel directly. The rest is all recounted by Kate Duchêne and Nikki Amuka-Bird into their desk microphones, punctuated by (wonderfully executed) time-lapse sequences to indicate the trial’s duration of more than 400 days.

All kinds of arguments can be made for this staging of what, in Stephens’ published script, is a more or less straight courtroom drama. There is a point to reducing the two extremes of grotesquerie, the exuberant and the grim, to the same perspective of indirect reportage; it may lead us to interrogate why our responses to such disparate material are so similar. It may suggest that reducing such enormities, whether the fictitious ones in the former kingdom of Baleshnik or the real ones in the likes of Liberia and the former Yugoslavia, to theatre is grotesque in itself. It may parody the recent vogue for “tribunal” plays at London’s Tricycle Theatre and elsewhere. And these are all substantial points, but ultimately they all pale beside the reality that is the resultant theatrical tedium.

Stephens has become a vocal champion of directors’ rights to interpret dramatic texts in the most radical, deconstructive ways, and Mitchell has over the past decade become a keen practitioner of taking work to pieces and showing us the components, but there comes a point when the result stops actually being theatre. This is not, to use the vogue phrase, “post-dramatic”; it is anti-dramatic. All right, so this presentation challenges us; well, then, we may challenge it back, and for me it fails that reciprocal test.

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