UBU

(Québec)

Technological Phantasmagorias I, II and III

Created and directed by Denis Marleau

The Blind, by Maurice Maeterlinck
Twelve faces suddenly appear out of the darkness. Six faces of men and six of women. Their gaze is aimless, directionless, unfocussed… All twelve are blind. Lost in a shadowy forest, far from the hospice where they live, they are waiting for their guide. They talk to hide their distress and to reassure themselves that they are not alone. They listen with fear or hope for the slightest sign around them. Their guide no longer answers. The Blind no longer know if it is day or night and are suspended in a metaphysical space between life and death; they feel abandoned.

A co-production by UBU, the Montréal Museum of Modern Art and the Avignon Festival. Awarded Best Production (Montréal) by the Québec Theatre Critics’ Association in 2002.

Sleep My Baby Sleep, by Jon Fosse
Three small creatures talk quietly. In the white light of limbo, they wonder where they are. What if they are nowhere, but there’s no such place as “nowhere”? Do they themselves even exist? Dors mon petit enfant (Sleep My Baby Sleep) is a small play that glints like a crystal. It draws us into the swirling complexities of Jon Fosse’s metaphysical explorations. Here he creates a state of plenitude floating between existence and its opposite, which is not death, but the beginning of everything.

Play, by Samuel Beckett
A husband, his wife, his mistress. A vaudeville with no trap doors or pratfalls. Instead we see huge jars where each person can take refuge and hide, leaving only the head exposed, to tell the truth. The truth in so many words, heard a thousand times before, all the clichés of love affairs intruding into their eerie, intercut soliloquies. But as chosen and structured by Beckett, these words spiral out of control and give glimpses in the orchestrated chiaroscuro of the solitude of the human being, visible behind the ludicrous moments in life and love.

Sleep My Baby Sleep and Play were co-produced by UBU, the French Theatre Department of Canada’s National Arts Centre and Le Manège, scène nationale de Maubeuge (France).

‘The living being must, perhaps, be removed completely from the stage. This is not to say that one would not thus return to a form of art from centuries long past, the last traces of which may be seen on the masks of the tragic Greeks. Will this, one day, be the role of sculpture, about which one begins to ask oneself such strange questions? Will the human being be replaced by a shadow, a projection of symbolic forms, or a being that would have the aspect of life without having life? I do not know; but the absence of the human being seems to me to be essential.’ Maurice Maeterlinck

The presentation of this trilogy of work is a UK Première
Please note that each performance is limited to 72 people