Somewhere between revisiting his first encounter with theatre (“it was so boring, with these people acting”), delivering a perfect imitation of Tom Waits’ blistered croon, and recalling how he and Samuel Beckett bonded over a shared love of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Robert Wilson begins sketching on a piece of paper.
In a few strokes, he renders the set of Beckett’s Happy Days and its famously trapped female protagonist. “The best Beckett works are those that are treated very artificially, like Keaton or Chaplin,” says the veteran US theatre director and artist.
“It’s all dance, it’s all timing, and the makeup is artificial. It is this other world and I’m always surprised that people try to do him in this more naturalistic way. He wrote an image that goes with the text and you can’t have this woman sitting on the street waiting for a bus.”
Naturalism is not a word associated with the theatre-maker, who is now 81. Over the past six decades, in his work and collaborations with everyone from William Burroughs to Lady Gaga, Wilson has not so much eschewed naturalism as refused to let it anywhere near the building. His latest project, which premiered at the Es Baluard museum in Palma de Mallorca on Saturday night, is no exception.
Ubu, a performance that fidgets between theatre, soundscape and visual art installation, is an exploration of Alfred Jarry’s scandalous 1896 play, Ubu Roi, and of Joan Miró’s long obsession with Jarry’s text.
A deeply subversive tale of power, tyranny, cruelty, violence – and the odd marauding bear – Ubu Roi caused a riot on its first night, 126 years ago. Jarry’s dramatic foreshadowing of surrealism, dadaism and the theatre of the absurd came to fascinate Miró, who made drawings and puppets based on the play, and found parallels between the dictatorial Ubu and General Franco.
As Wilson points out, Jarry and Miró’s subject matter is simultaneously topical and timeless. “It’s in some ways very timely with this terrible war we have going on now in Ukraine with the Russians,” he says. “And it’s not unlike the time in which [Miró’s] work was created, with Franco. But it’s one of those myths that playwrights have written about for centuries.”
The draw for the director was the absurdity of Ubu and its collision of the terrifying and the comic. Humour, he says, “can make a situation much more terrifying. And we shouldn’t make theatre actually if we can’t laugh or if we don’t have that distance from the material. It’s the space behind the mask that gives the space in front power. It’s not a counterpoint; it’s finding the right point”.
Wilson’s new take, a sinister, multilingual pantomime bathed in red light and looped in noise, is fittingly violent, absurd, ominous and infantile. Amid the chaos and bloodshed, jaunty dance routines cover scene changes and the bear from Jarry’s original waves balefully at the audience.
According to the Es Baluard museum’s director, Imma Prieto, the idea of the piece is to remind the audience that Ubu and his murderous mediocrity have never really disappeared.
“We are called upon to open up cracks in creation, exposing gaps from where brave and free gestures might decry injustice and barbarism,” she says.
Wilson says Miró’s visual interpretations of Jarry’s work offered him a kind of freedom and suited his approach to theatre. And a puppet, he notes, featured in his first play, The King of Spain, back in the late 1960s. “So when I was asked to do this work, I thought of that big puppet I had and in some ways it’s going back to my origins, my roots.”
More particularly, Ubu appealed to what Wilson describes as his “painterly” mindset. “The stage picture is a kind of mask for a text. I very often stage a work – whether it’s The Ring of Wagner or Hamlet – visually first, and then later I add text. The visual book is as important as the audio.”
In life, adds Wilson, what we see is every bit as important as what we hear. And, very often, there is a tension between the two.
“Half an hour ago, I saw Donald Trump on TV. If you listen to what he’s saying, it’s one thing. But if you look, you’ll see it’s a lie. The body doesn’t lie.”
Wilson is reluctant to speculate as to how his first audience in Palma will react to the piece. But he says his highly visual style tends to make for smooth border crossings.
“Even tonight, where I speak a lot of the text myself in English, and where I’d say 50% of the public won’t understand the words, because it’s staged visually, there’s no language barrier,” he says, “It’s what you see. What I see is what I see, and what I hear is what I hear. Ideally, anyone can walk into that theatre tonight and get something from it.”
If Saturday’s virgin audience was often unsure when to laugh and when to wince, it eventually offered Wilson a standing ovation rather than the riot Jarry had to contend with. And even if the play has lost some of its shock value over the past 100 years, the world it reflects has not.
“It was pretty shocking just to see the TV a half-hour ago,” says Wilson. “The charts and the popularity of Donald Trump. That’s pretty shocking.”
Ubu by Robert Wilson is at Es Baluard museum, Palma de Mallorca, until 23 October. Sam Jones’s trip was provided by Es Baluard.
