From the comic to the absurd, but not for laughs: the Hampstead Theatre stages The Trial of Ubu, based on Ubu Roi, the early absurdist drama by Alfred Jarry about a ludicrous but terrifying despot. This reinterpretation is written by Simon Stephens and directed by Katie Mitchell, both of whom face a major hurdle in revisiting a play and a character few in the audience know (not even in Hampstead).
Things get off to an engaging start with marionettes reenacting the original Ubu story in a box halfway up a wall. This parts, in a nifty design by Lizzie Clachan, to reveal another box, inhabited by two interpreters at the trial of a mass-murderer, trapped in uncosy proximity to the defendant in a war-crimes case that never seems to get anywhere.
Ubu is Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe, Colonel Gaddafi and Syria's Bashar al-Assad all rolled into one ghastly stream of murderous consciousness: shifting blame, undermining truth and turning on his associates and co-culprit wife. Although the play sets out to examine the elusive nature of justice and its shaky foundations in international law, it is a lot better at dealing with the impossibility of finding a formal language which can deal with the worst in mankind.
Nikki Amuka-Bird and Kate Duchêne have demanding parts as the interpreters, lagging fractionally behind ordinary speech rhythms, a technique which lends the play an alienated, syncopated quality. Mitchell's direction is assured but a bit cold, and the argumentative heart of the play is weak. Ubu, whether as a puppet or as played here as a death-mask figure by Paul McCleary, remains an unsettling eternal villain, but I can't shake off the thought that this is a radio play which got too big for its boots
Last word goes to the Arcola in Dalston, one of the most consistently stimulating small venues in London. Now it has a new building in Ashwin Street, described as "carbon neutral" and thus so cold when I visited to see Max Frisch's Count Oederland that it gave fresh meaning to the theatre of cruelty. Frisch's acidic take on a postwar Swiss dystopia is the kind of play Mehmet Ergen, the Arcola's director, selects so well. His repertoire combines recently forgotten European works with new writing and stage traditions as diverse as those from his native Turkey, Germany, post-Cold War eastern Europe and Africa. There's Dalstonian grit too, so this month you could try The Pitchfork Disney, about druggy, traumatised bedsit dwellers whose parents have been murdered. What's not to like?
I'll plump instead for Purge, adapted from Sofi Oksanen's stirring novel about Estonia's Nazi and Soviet occupations and their tendrils in the present. Do check out the plucky new Arcola: all you need to survive is a plastic beaker of Merlot and a tartan rug.
