Ubu: Le Roi s'Amuse!

After the jump, a quick post on the Deutschestheater's production of König Ubu (Ubu the King), which I saw tonight, woo hoo for drammer.

Er, mom and dad, don't translate the text on this program.

I hadn’t been feeling up to theatre this week - dealing with some insomnia, a little exhaustion, some homesickness, you know. Had a ticket to Marat/Sade that I returned over the weekend because I was running on three hours of sleep, and sitting in the front row of a German production of Peter Weiss's brilliant/brutal play seemed... a bit much. But I got myself out to see König Ubu (Ubu Roi, Ubu the King, or what you will) at the Deutschestheater tonight and was reminded anew how much theatre energizes me, and how I love it even (especially?) when it's messy and wild.

The production was almost a parody of German art theatre: pitched in that stereotypical fantastic guttural rasp, all bold design choices and effect-driven performances. It was scatological and inconsistent, manic and grasping: everything a production of Ubu violently needs to be. Three performers took on the world of the play (very 500 Clown in energy and style, if not their equal in constant risk of injury). Over and over, they lunged into self-gratifying bits, the kind of stupid things actors do to crack each other up (or kids do running rampant around the house), playing all sides of a violent conflict, voicing eight or nine characters in a scene, or just going for broke as they howled, slapped, made obscene gestures, vomited, and worse. (No really, you could play German Theatre Bingo with this production.) And the thing is, this was GREAT. It was lively, it was all playing to the audience, and it was exactly the crude, vaguely incoherent blunt instrument that Jarry wrote.

But there was a moment in the back half, as Ubu, having seized the throne, confronts a pair of recalcitrant peasants (played by foam dolls voiced falsetto by the other two actors), where their quiet and totally hapless optimism in cheering for the rightful heir met with an atypically bored, affectless, quiet Ubu. The foam dolls threw wadded-up paper at him, chanted slogans, and tugged on his shoelaces as he methodically soaked them down with a spray bottle and kicked them off the stage. It was funny, it was cute, and it was weirdly harrowing, a fable-like picture of innocent idealism crushed by the banality of evil. For all that the following scene dragged out puppets of Trump, Marie Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Norbert Hofer, and other right-wing nationalists I didn’t recognize, this was the one that felt the most connected to Now, the audience locked into the moment with the actors, a crackling feedback loop that you sometimes get in that moment of communion.

Sooooo yeah. Make-em-ups! Go see a play! Even when they’re a mess they can be great! Goodnight!