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Published: 26 January, 2012
by SIMON WROE

WHAT do you expect from a play about a dictator facing murder and torture charges in The Hague? If it’s contrition, explanation or, God forbid, justice, you won’t find it here, in this strange and rather brilliant offering from writer Simon Stephens and director Katie Mitchell.

The audience drew a sharp collective breath as the tyrant Pere Ubu appeared on stage, not as a man or a monster, but as a puppet.

A grotesque Punch with a puerile tongue, a usurper to the throne, whose reign of terror and bloodshed is told in violent potty-mouthed jabber.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, but he never said anything about puppets.

When the puppets fold, the play turns its attention to a pair of interpreters in a small box room at Hague, finely played by Kate Duchêne and Nikki Amuka-Bird.

Through their detached monotone we hear the charges against this despot, the witness statements and Ubu’s defence.

At first the effect is bland, even dehumanising, but as the days and months pass (told at times in fast forward), we begin to glimpse emotions behind the interpreters’ veneer, and see the toll these lengthy, horrific and absurd trials exert on the ciphers of the court.

The play happily ramps up that absurdity. Every cartoonish action and childish insult of the puppets is examined.

When Ubu finally appears in flesh, an old and feeble man, his face bears the same paint as his puppet.

Stephens has chosen lurid metaphor over documentary, and some (those asthmatic drawers of breath) will think the play fails because of it.

Of all the dramatic territories, political allegory has the greatest potential for disaster. Alfred Jarry’s 1896 Ubu Roi, one of the first outings for this merry cutthroat, caused riots in Paris.

Credit to Mitchell and Stephens then, for still making the subject feel dangerous.

They have crafted a tense and muscular 90-minute work that questions the efficacy of international law without getting mired in the theory. All it lacks, perhaps, is a coda.

Not a verdict or anything so prescriptive – the play is rightly more concerned with the testimony than the judgement – but I would have liked to see more of the broken Ubu, now in the care of the state, a shadow of the monster he was.

The man might have lost his power, but the character has not.

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