Photo: Mathieu Doyon
IRELAND has ‘GUBU’ embedded in its vernacular thanks to Charles Haughey’s memorable description of an arrest for double murder in his then attorney general’s home: “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented”.
Meet UBU by way of Montreal, a puppet and ‘object’ theatre company that is drawn to social and political allegory. From Quebec, Theatre de la Pire Espece brings ‘UBU on the Table’ to life for its Irish premier in Limerick’s Belltable this Friday January 27 at 8pm.
‘UBU on the Table’ sees the invasion of Poland by the French told through the brandishing of – wait for it – bread baguettes, cutlery, molasses, ketchup and kitchen utensils.
This robust production has made 800 performances internationally, fashioned after the original text by French playwright Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi’, 1896. It is admired for “unbridled imagination, baroque plenitude and surgical precision”.
Limerick Post caught up with the play’s co- creator Francis Monty in Canada by phone at the moment Donald Trump is being sworn in. The coincidence is not lost. Monty introduces the premise of this adult puppet show, two men playing a dozen characters each.
“Our main medium is ‘object’ theatre which is a type of puppetry with specific roles. The actor is more involved in the representation than is normal. It’s like animation in movies and cinema but with an actor between the objects, the tools so to say, and the audience is watching the performers as much as the objects”.
“UBU is a story written about a stupid guy who will take power over the country and will kill almost everyone. [People] have to grab their belongings and fly.”
Action begets re-action: “There will be a revolution against UBU and he will have to fly”.
Relevance today? “Yes and no. It was written a long time ago and we did it first 20 years ago but there is still a lot of people like that in the world!”
He laughs, and speaks of magic and storytelling and immersion in this combative world of (24) men at a kitchen table, marching on the world with forks.
Book a place setting through venue manager www.limetreetheatre.ie
