The School of Contemporary Arts brings you Ubu Cocu, SFU theatre’s fall mainstage production. Directed by Nicole DesLauriers, Ubu Cocu is about a sometimes-king named Ubu who invades the home of an old scientist and discovers that his wife is cheating on him. This isn’t Ubu’s only problem, though: his kids are running amok, his conscience is a constant nag, and he can’t get any pie. That’s right — pie.
The play is by French absurdist playwright Alfred Jarry and is part of a trilogy, which included Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded), Ubu Roi (Ubu the King or King Turd), and Ubu Enchaîné (Ubu in Chains). Only Ubu Roi ever ran during Jarry’s lifetime, and Ubu Cocu was never finished, but the pre-surrealist work was considered an influential classic of French theatre. The three works were all originally conceived to viciously satirize greed, religion, royalty, and stupidity.
“This is my favourite of the Ubu plays — it’s short and to the point, the characters are extremely intriguing, it’s hilarious and it has a chorus of sorts,” DesLauriers explains. She translated the play herself from French, creating a contemporary adaptation of the script with Tyler Nichols. “We’ve tightened up bits that seemed long and drawn out in translation and tried to freshen it up.”
The play seems an unlikely choice, with its many poop jokes and a set that features a sewage hole, but these unexpected aspects make it all the more fun and challenging. “This play is very close to my heart, and it is exciting to see how the show grew from the seed that it was to what it is today,” says DesLauriers. The absurdist nature of the play means that it does not follow the structure of a traditional production; what happens will be unpredictable.
“I think that if you know how to handle it, absurdism is not really that absurd at all. My approach is to find the logic of the world . . . and then direct it with a ‘realistic’ approach. As long as the audience doesn’t try to place too much ‘real world’ logic on it, it’s totally relatable!” DesLauriers says.
The original Ubu character acted as a biting critique of the French bourgeois society and its evils during the late nineteenth century, but his stupidity and fumbling ineptitude seems to translate well in a time when relationship statuses become public domain. Despite its subject matter, Ubu Cocu is an original and entertaining production.
I think that if you know how to handle it, absurdism is not really that absurd at all.” Nicole DesLauriers, director
“There is original music, singing, romance, puppets, comedy, gender bending, hints of relationships for all sexual orientations, characters you love, characters you hate and those that you love to hate,” DesLauriers says.
Students have been working hard on this production since the beginning of the fall semester. Auditions were held during the first week, and since then the cast has been working at least six days a week. Because of the show’s character-driven nature, much rehearsal time was spent developing characters and reworking the script. DesLauriers is a self-professed “collaborative director,” so working off of actors and designers helped to shape the final production.
The play has afforded students the opportunity to incorporate their own ideas into the pproduction. One of the actors says, “The show goes where we haven’t gone before in other acting opportunities; it pushes our boundaries.”
