A repetitive play that lacks the content to match its stylistics.
Simon Stephens' The Trial of Ubu sways between a succinct dissection of modern criminal justice and the theatricals of a trial, but unfortunately we don't get enough of either. In an interview with Will Mortimer, Stephens talks about the way theatre “is formed out of a need to interrogate the human animal through drama,” and in this Katie Mitchell-directed play he demonstrates that it's a need shared with our sense of justice and punishment.
Stephens' Pa Ubu in Joker-esque face paint is even more abhorrent than Alfred Jarry's original evil dictator and his Ma Ubu smacks of Lady Macbeth like manipulation without the remorse and only the blame. We hear Ubu's trial through two stoic interpreters, whose scenes make up the bulk of the play. They do contrast each other nicely but are limited to delivering their lines with the neutrality you expect. Niki Amuka-Bird's mix of nervousness, over-excitement and alertness proves you can make something out of a nothing role, while Kate Duchêne provides a softer approach. Her interpreter has a familiarity with proceedings but not with Ubu's casual sense of cruelty. Their scenes rattle through the back and forth between prosecutor and defendant, skipping months at a time in lightening speed to show the excessive duration of the trial; time needed to go through Ubu's endless charges. But Mitchell has them continue in this pattern and their scenes become painfully repetitive.
Similarly, the abridged puppet show of Jarry's Ubu Roi, while immensely enjoyable, only makes the same point over and over again. The absurdity of dictators and our relation to them is handled far better during two stand-out scenes. In one, the prosecutor and counsel for the defence use a fag break to debate our need to exercise what weighs on our conscience and our supposed mission for a better world with the “moral masturbation” of International Criminal Court. This brief scene, though clearly shoehorned in and far too functional, is still one of the most interesting.
It's bettered only by Ubu's run-down of human atrocities over the last century and a half. “Do you know what I'm thinking about when you're talking?” he asks his prosecutor before delivering a relentless list of international war crimes, many of which are still to make it to a tribunal. He captures, in a brief minute, an ongoing period of intense, global human cruelty before the play returns to labouring the same points it's been making all along. For a ninety-minute play an awful lot of time is spent waiting around. 
The Trial of Ubu runs at Hampstead Theatre until 25th February 2012.
Images by Stephen Cummiskey
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