The Trial of Ubu

Katie Mitchell's intellectually rigorous UK premiere of Simon Stephens's 2010 play isn't exactly a crowd pleaser. The light relief comes at the start: 'The Trial of Ubu' was written as a response to Alfred Jarry's scatological surreal
classic 'Ubu Roi', and is here prefaced by a short Punch and Judy-style puppet condensation of the 1896 play, performed through a hatch in Lizzie Clachan's slick wood panelled set.

Tracing squeaky antihero Pa Ubu's despotic seizure of a fictional country, it's an amusing overture that neatly summarises the crimes he will be tried for in Stephens' play, at the International Criminal Court 114 years later.

The play proper is a courtroom drama of sorts, with Ubu in the dock. Mitchell's innovation - which deviates from both script and the original 2010 German production - is to set virtually all the action in a wooden booth, in which two interpreters played by Nikki Amuka-Bird and Kate Duchene dispassionately relay the dialogue being spoken in a Hague trial room that we never actually see.

Mitchell's distancing technique certainly lends a sense of the unwieldy enormity of ICC tribunals: tiredness creeps into the interpreters' eyes as definitions of genocide are quibbled over and the case drags deep into its second year. It becomes impossible to define this interminable bureaucratic wrangle as 'justice' in any sort of romantic sense.

But while it's an effective if austere satire on the compromised nature of international justice, there is a didactic power and absurdist wit in Stephens's text that is simply not there in Mitchell's treatment. Her Ubu is more of an idea than a real presence, and while this approach has merits, raw entertainment value isn't one of them in a gruelling, installation-like production.