Student-Directed 'Ubu Roi' Shocks, Unbalances With Frantic Energy
Victoria Harris, the Brown Daily Herald, February 21, 2002

"We're sorry," clamor the long-john clad actors of the play "Ubu Roi," swarming with a confusing, intrusive, and even remotely irritating presence as they talk to various members of the waiting audience in the pre-show interim.

"The show is meant to unbalance you," said director Gideon Arthurs, and from its outset the senior showcase piece "Ubu Roi" succeeded in doing just that. When it debuted in December, 1896, Alfred Jarry's play shocked crowds with its combination of hyper absurdism and biting social commentary. Ubu Roi does the same today.

The frenetic energy of the players, garbed in quasi-military-cum-winged-monkey suits, comes across with resounding force. Shrieks, growls, snorts and grunts prevail, creating a cacophony of bestial proportions. The audience is left with an impression of man as animal and society as zoo.

While sex was likely not an integral part of the original production, Arthurs interacts playfully with the script, turning war scenes into orgies, highlighting the strange similarity between sex and violence in today's culture. The young prince Bougrelas becomes a warped version of Hamlet, with an eyebrow-raising Oedipal relationship to his mother the queen.

In the decadent disarray, one might recall the twisted artistry of Edward Gorey, not only in the lamp-black eyeshadow but in the paradoxical marriage of royal decadence and the literal "decay" of the stage, which is ringed with trash. This is not a vanilla sexuality, bestiality, incest and an incident in which a soldier is "compromised" by a rather aggressive bear. The king and his company eat an unappetizing grayish mush from a bucket; Marie Antoinette may have "let them eat cake," but Ubu Roi takes the aristocracy and feeds them their own offal.

Thomas Beatty's convincing portrayal of Pere Ubu, an imbecilic aristocrat, is both amusing and disconcertingly realistic. Ubu is convinced by his manipulative wife Mere Ubu (Rachael Bibby) to murder the King of Poland and usurp the throne. Their resulting adventures contain no moral lesson but instead make a series of critiques about the nature of humanity.

Although Bibby's character could have used further development, she succeeded in portraying a completely self-interested, greedy woman. Despite standout lead parts, it was the ensemble players who truly made the show. Their ability to portray a number of different roles in close succession and maintain each character's integrity was impressive, to say the least. Arthurs said, "it's so hard to stage. There's huge battle scenes... it's impossible."

Kerry Silva in particular shone as a range of different characters, from a womanizing adolescent crusader to a Russian soldier. Although she stated that "the hardest thing was not playing extremes," Silva preserved a believable balance in each of her characters, seamlessly transferring from part to part.

Beatty said the cast worked together learning to interact before picking up the script, and their cohesiveness was apparent evening in the play's weakest moments. He laughingly related the director's analogy which "compared the process to risotto - at first you have lots of little hard pieces of rice and then it all comes together in the end."

Visual media of solders, material culture and war were disconcerting and disturbing. The visuals alternated with highly ceremonial classical music, including Carmina Burana and Thus Spake Zarathustra, the pomp of the pieces magnifying the ridiculousness of the story.

Allusions to George W. Bush and the present political situation can be found throughout, making the play particularly potent. Arthurs focused on giving the staging "exactitude," realizing the possibility to keep the century-old production contemporary. On one level, Ubu Roi is a scathing critique of the military, government and war that leaves the viewer questioning the motivations of rulers both present and past. Kings are clowns, the queen is a "buffooness" and the heir apparent wields a sword that dwarfs him by several feet.

Despite its absurdity, or perhaps because of it, "Ubu Roi" succeeds in unnerving its audience and forcing them to seriously contemplate the nature of their society as well as themselves. Although remaining outside the circus would be more comforting, by not venturing into the absurd world of "shittrs" and sex, one would risk missing an opportunity for both laughter and serious contemplation.