Cheek by Jowl’s Ubu Roi

This play, it farts, it licks, it spits. Cheek by Jowl’s hugely successful Ubu Roi returns to the Barbican in all its decadence-smashing scrutiny.

An adolescent boy with a camera pans over dead meat and the extreme close-up is projected on the crème walls of a pristine dining room. A middle-aged couple swoops on stage arranging the dinner table, vases and pictures on the walls into perfect angles. It’s a flawless surface but underneath seethes a greed and lust irreconcilable with the immaculate image presented. The boy with the camera knows that the closer you look the more abominable the things you will uncover. What unfolds in the next two hours is a radical dissection of regal power and the futility of financial gain that is playful, shocking but also shockingly good.

Alfred Jarry’s fin-de-siècle piece Ubu Roi follows père Ubu and his wife (Camille Cayol as a Lady Macbeth-clone and Christophe Grégoire as the fool king) who plot to kill the current ruler Wenceslas of Poland (Romain Cottard). Together with his entourage Ubu takes over and then wrecks the kingdom with his arbitrary ruling and killings. The text at the first glance might not appear as transgressive as it did when it was originally performed in 1896 with audiences rioting when faced with the manic king and his depravity. Director Declan Donnellan found a way to make it relevant and startling again by paralleling the seemingly amorality-affirming, carnevalesque piece with the setting of a bourgeois French dinner party.

Switching back and forth to much comedic effect the two worlds are woven together expertly. The boy’s initial camera exploration for example exposes faecal stains on an off-stage bathroom rug the usurper king will wear later at his coronation. And there are other inventive uses of everyday household goods that serve as props. A loo brush serves the king as a sceptre and a cleaning spray bottle becomes a deadly weapon to defend from attacks. It becomes clear that only the young heir Bougrelas can stop the manic traitor Ubu. In a oedipal twist Sylvain Levitt, giving a forceful performance, doubles up as the young heir and the adolescent observing the party.

These depicted characters are of course only monarchs and dukes in cipher. With all its crassly comedic antics the pieces comes uncomfortably close to exposing the mechanism behind the kind of moral short-circuiting that happens on the striking surface where political and financial power kindle their destructive flames. There is a lovely, simple line the king utters which translates from the original French the piece is performed into “I’m going to kill everyone and then… and then… I’ll go away.” Nick Ormerod’s white-washed, open design provides the literal canvas under which nothing remains hidden and which, after the performance, is left in a state of utter anarchy. Ketchup on the walls, food on the floor, furniture upturned – a perfect representation of the destructive effects of Ubu’s power hunger driven by an eternal “just because”.

Under the pressure and violence of this absurd figure language becomes more and more precarious and consonants start to slip and move about. “Merde” becomes “merdre”,  “finance” turns into “phynance” – a kind of absurd spluttering and tottering reflective of the corrupted political structure the play concerns itself with. In the alternate world dinner party world distinguishable language is completely absent altogether.

This piece celebrates the absurd and pulls out all the stops, it’s visceral, provoking and a joy to watch.

Mozart Undone at the Barbican

Quite what they were expecting when attending a theatre-concert based on Mozart, the audience at the Barbican didn’t seem to know. There was promise to take the ennui out of a concert experience and add some visual spice to it. The delivery on that promise turned out to be a little more daring than simply that.

Thankfully it’s not controversial just for the sake of it. As a creative endeavour Betty Nansen Teatret, Cederholm & Hellemann Bros’ Mozart Undone is a tremendous achievement. A balance between theatrical performance, modern dance piece and music concert, the event reimagines and illustrates some 28 pieces from all corners of the Köchel catalogue. Well-known melodies are constantly broken down and visual expectations are reversed and played with. The piece tumbles across the genres of modern music history stealing movements from country music to electronic, from pop ballad to soft rock. The characters, too, are like feathers blowing from one situation to the next.

It starts with a harmless flirtation on a piano. In a decrepit theatre space, a group of eleven performers and musicians innocently fool around with water dripping from the ceiling as a version of Piano Concerto No.23 in A, 2. Adagio is being played live on stage. Usually instruments are hidden away, but to have them as part of the action is a nice treat, and not just when the electric guitar is played like a fiddle might be played by a possessed violinist. Over time the performance works itself into a wild frenzy of disturbing images spliced with slapstick humour and plenty of glitter.

Lotte Andersen from the Danish crime drama The Bridge and her fellow cast member are once in highly inventive makeshift rococo costumes (Anja Vang Kragh) and in the next minute locked in hour-glasses, submerged in bath tubs or transformed into nightmarish plaster orcs. The scope of just what the performers do with their voices and how they melt into one organic Gesamtkunstwerk is extraordinary. Claus Hempler is channeling David Bowie on more than one occasion and his powdery, dramatic voice adds a surreal cabaret dimension. When the vocally stunning Louise Hart and the rocker of the ensemble, Bjørn Fjæstad, perform ‘Under The Heartwood Tree’ we get hints of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. The breadth of musical trickery paired with visually exciting transformations is full of flourishes and never fails to amuse and surprise.

If you are a Mozart purist then you might not appreciate the unabashed way the ensemble reworks the classic melodies to an audio-visual spectacle. The rejigging of songs not only adds an additional layer of a different musical genre, but it also causes a significant change in the visual contexts the classic Mozart songs are associated with. Viewers might take exception to loading Mozart’s tunes with claustrophobic or sexual imagery because any original artistic intention might be subverted or overpowered.

Audiences tend to either love or hate what they don’t fully understand because it feels as if those pieces reach into a different realm. Although contrasting motifs of pure water and sullied flesh and bellicose humans, Nikolaj Cederholm’s direction steers clear of tying anything up too neatly. Inventing new forms of musical expression is what the wunderkind Mozart has become known for, so what better way to pay homage than to use his music to explore new theatrical formats? Mozart Undone is definitely whimsical and may have picked up some influences from iconic director Robert Wilson, but the conviction of the concept of a theatre-concert upholds nonetheless. There are few shows truly as spellbinding as this one. Unsurprisingly there were instant standing ovations at the final bow.