On Wednesday this week (18th) we will start to preview the show that I’ve been working on with Katie Mitchell at the Hampstead Theatre. It’s the UK premier of a play that Simon Stephens has written as a companion piece to Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi‘.
January 2010. The International Criminal Tribunal sitting in The Hague. Day 436. The dictator Ubu, the grotesque andamoral megalomaniac from Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi, is before a UN constituted International Tribunal charged with Crimes against Humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law.
Is this the justice of the victors? Is this the best way to deal with the perpetrators of unspeakable crime? Wherein lies the legitimacy of an internationally convened Tribunal?
The Trial of Ubu is a savage comedy that interrogates the assumptions of a Court as it struggles to deal with defendants who are not only opposed to the morality of law, but exist in a different moral dimension altogether.
As always, it has been a fascinating process and doubtless the production will provoke mixed reactions and a lot of discussion!
I hope you can make it!