This was one of the eeriest theatrical occasions I can recall. An audience of six, including three critics and two of the theatre staff, watched an eight-strong, all female troupe grappling with Alfred Jarry's scatological landmark.
But theatre without a proper audience becomes a pointless ritual, rather like holy communion without the bread and wine.
Jarry's portrait of a monstrous, animalistic tyrant provoked fury in 1896: it was, as Martin Esslin says, an attempt to confront a bourgeois audience with its own complacency and greed. But how do you recreate a similar frisson today?
The Royal Court succeeded in 1966 by casting Max Wall as Ubu and getting David Hockney to design grotesquely surreal costumes. Peter Brook also directed a famous rough-theatre version in 1978 in which vast industrial cables came to symbolise Ubu's oppressive state machine.
Here, however, you have eight young women, clad in uniform black singlets and trousers, using the techniques of physical theatre to express Jarry's vision of uncontrolled appetite; and the result is inevitably to aestheticise the experience.
The women dutifully make farting noises and contort their bodies to become food laden tables, swaying trees, shimmering ghosts and eventually the clashing armies of Ubu's Owe-land (here substituted for Poland) and Russia. But this is more aerobics than art and the sheer horror of Jarry's image of overweening tyranny gets lost.
You have to admire the cast's dedication: in particular that of Kyla Davis as a domineeringly brawny Ubu and Daniela Garcia Casilda as his vindictively scrawny spouse. Albi Gravener on jazz saxophone also adds atmosphere to Jon Hewitt's production.
But the techniques of physical theatre not only add to the running time: it's five minutes before we get to the opening word "Shite!" They also prove inadequate to the task of recreating the explosive shock of Jarry's foul-mouthed parody Macbeth.
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