Ubu Roi
Factory Performance Space, Sligo
★★★★★
After a violent seizure of power sends shock waves through a 19th-century Russian empire, Papa Ubu, the astonishing tyrant of Alfred Jarry’s play from 1896, takes a moment to reassess his alliances. He promised his military captain the dukedom of Lithuania when the fighting was over.
“Now that I no longer need him, he can kiss my ass,” Papa Ubu says, artfully offhand in John Carty’s performance. It’s inspired phrasing in Blue Raincoat’s outstanding production. This, too, is the crass language of diplomacy in our own era.
Jarry’s trashy creation has always resembled a vulgar version of Macbeth. Papa Ubu, a former bigwig now afloat in the king’s cavalry, is persuaded into conspiracy by his wife. “I’d put that ass on a throne,” she says in Sandra O’Malley’s breathtakingly blunt portrayal.
What follows is a scheme that takes place across countries, between palaces and lairs represented by the silo-like frame of Jamie Vartan’s abstract set, to eerie music by Joe Hunt, resembling a roomful of creaking wooden instruments and screeching strings.
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That may seem a burlesque of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but Jarry deviates somewhere original, away from a despot obsessed with clinging to power in Macbeth, and instead one devouring a country (possibly literally: he keeps threatening people – “You’ll be in a pot”).
Preposterously rotund in an exposed fat suit, Carty doesn’t lean into the obvious grotesquerie of the bloated and unsanitary Papa Ubu, who yields a toilet brush as a sceptre. He occasionally sounds like an easily affected and sensitive Victorian with a Sligo accent. (“I’ve already given myself indigestion,” he whimpers, reclining.)
In the flippant cruelty of drawingroom comedy, Carty’s Papa Ubu can be a revelation: a ruler who’s ruthlessly dismissive, announcing execution orders on an inconvenienced whim (“I’m going to kill you. I don’t want to spend money”).
As Papa Ubu slaughters servants and civilians, collecting their finances, the many murders notch up quite the body count. The challenge of providing some scale to that tragedy spurs the director Niall Henry to perhaps his greatest work.
When Blue Raincoat emerged in the 1990s, the company’s approach to movement looked carefully restrained and precise compared with that of other physical-theatre companies of the era (the impressively elaborate spectacles of Barabbas; the runaway physicality of Corn Exchange).
Here they deploy their most high-energy movement in years, fencing in Jarry’s whirlingly dark play. When there are casualties Henry abruptly brings the action to a halt, as if in freeze-frame, jolting slain soldiers out of their combat stances: “Ack! I’m dying!” A rising death toll becomes represented by a running gag.
Such fantastic chaos becomes remarkably disorientating, as even the battlefield of the play’s final scenes becomes a comical chase scene, presenting international warfare as head-spinning slapstick.
That is the unsettling chill of Jarry’s play, something that seems insistently frivolous but is really warning about something dangerous. “If there were no Poland, there would be no Poles,” Papa Ubu says, sailing into the sunset. If there were no countries, there would be no inhabitants to devour whole.
Ubu Roi is at the Factory Performance Space, Sligo, until Saturday, March 14th
