Ubu King

The director Fabio Cherstich returns to the stage of the Argentina Theater with a provocative and revolutionary text of the twentieth century theater on the satire of power: Ubu King, by the French playwright Alfred Jarry. 

In this new version of the play, the director uses some linguistic games, or mixes, for example, Neapolitan with French, to give the text new nuances. Alongside the director, to take care of the visual and dramaturgical part of the staging, we find Luigi Serafini, artist and author of the Codex Seraphinianus. Serafini transforms the stalls of the Argentina Theater into a suburban beach that acts as a surreal backdrop to the scene: together with the sand, pipe structures and costumes that resemble works of art or strange contraptions.

The play, staged for the first time in 1896 at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris, is considered an anticipation of the surrealist movement of the theater of the absurd: its author mixes provocation, farce, parody and crass humor. The main character, King Ubu, almost a human puppet, is represented with grotesque and almost animal-like aspects: eager for power and money, immoral, greedy, cynical, brutal and, at the same time, coward.

In this new and original staging, the director manages to make an ever-current text more alive than ever, making it dialogue with the visual arts and language.

Photo credits: Teatro di Roma official site