Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi

2 / 5 stars
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

French dramatist Alfred Jarry's absurdist 1896 play, Ubu Roi, was a scathing satire on political ambition that influenced the emerging Dada and surrealist movements. It also had a profound effect on a precocious 1970s Cleveland teenager, David Thomas, who named his similarly avant-garde art-punk band, Pere Ubu, after the work.

Thirty years on, Thomas and Pere Ubu have revisited the play as part of the South Bank's Ether festival, in order to "pay off a debt to Jarry". On a bare black stage lit by abstract projections by the Brothers Quay, Thomas and Sarah-Jane Morris play the king-murdering titular hero and his shrew-like wife, Mère Ubu; Pere Ubu the band make atonal interjections from the stage's edge.

Thomas has rewritten and updated Jarry's provocative original text, but sadly he has not improved it. Jarry's richly scatological nonsense language, all "nob-box" and "dogbum", has been sacrificed, and an already oblique plot is concertinaed to the point of impenetrability. For the most part, the audience simply has no idea what is going on.

It does not help that Thomas, a compelling rock front man, is no actor. Jarry's larger-than-life Ubu is a Falstaffian venal rogue, in thrall to his coarse appetites, but the awkward Thomas plays him as a flat, dull drone. As he hunches into his giant raincoat, his reedy drawl mangles his words so bizarrely that he is largely unintelligible.

The vivacious Morris is excellent as the plotting queen, but the fact that she and Thomas pore over scripts throughout makes the production seem badly under-rehearsed. Overall, it is a valiant venture, but one that is too frequently absurd in the wrong sense of the word.