Director Declan Donnellan talks about Ubu Roi and much more

22nd August 2014

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INTERVIEW: DECLAN DONNELLAN

The artistic director of Cheek by Jowl, currently riding high with his hit West End staging of Shakespeare in Love, talks to Heather Neill about his work, discussing in detail his bold reinterpretation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, performed in French. Recorded at the Barbican, 19 August 2014.

It’s important when you put on a play you understand what it is a reaction to. It’s very clear that Ubu is a reaction to the strictures of bourgeois life in France in the nineteenth century…  Jarry is just looking at his parents, his well-ordered bourgeois life and wondering what’s underneath.