"It’s impossible not to be transfixed by the raging force of its energy...What makes this 'Ubu Roi' more than a clever riff on a period piece is its sense of the raw, ravening anger in the boy’s satirical vision. The show’s penultimate scene hits you like a blast of dirty, icy water. It’s an all-too-relevant reminder that the asocial fury and confusion we tend to think as just a passing phase (he’ll grow out of it) among teenagers does, on occasion, give birth to truly murderous monsters."
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"'Make no mistake: It’s a punk play...The problem is Jarry’s nihilistic masterwork is completely gonzo, with made-up words, grotesque characters and outlandish plot developments that make it hard to stage. Luckily, Donnellan found a great way around that...There’s a thin line between order and chaos, and it’s often darkly funny."
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"Amusing, slightly exhausting production...But Donnellan, who is one of the most inventive directors alive, and his designer, Nick Ormerod, rescue the evening from glibness by visually and verbally switching the point of view."
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"“School-boy humour” tends to get a bad press. But where would theatre be without it? As a golden opportunity arises to watch Cheek by Jowl’s acclaimed production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi – seize it! – it feels only right to bow and scrape a bit before Jarry’s seminal act of juvenile disrespect."
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"The brilliance and intelligence but also the fun of Director Donnellan's wise, ticklish staging is that it out-does Jarry himself. By interweaving scenes of an unruffled dinner with the maniacal explosion of subterranean force – Donnellan permits himself not only to match the Surrealism of Jarry’s original, but in some ways to better or advance it."
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"How do you recapture the shock impact of Alfred Jarry's 1896 play, with its savage portrait of a grotesque monster? Declan Donnellan has had a brilliant idea in this production: he plays it as the Oedipal fantasy of a camcorder-clutching teenager taking revenge on his parents and their French bourgeois world."
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"This exhilaratingly fresh and witty take on the play has a blackly hilarious twist...This is a production that keeps flipping, with laugh-out-loud switches of intensity, between the babble of an ordinary bourgeois function and the madly epic misadventures of the royal pair."
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"The reliably challenging company Cheek by Jowl does justice to Jarry’s eccentric vision in this expressively physical revival...This is absurd theatre with a brashly apocalyptic resonance, and Donnellan directs with inventiveness. The result, though hard to watch, is an inspired production of a gruesome drama."
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