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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Simon Stephens qtd. in Matt Trueman, ‘Recession Has Made British Audiences More Conservative, Says Playwright’, Guardian, 9 February 2012 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/feb/09/recession-british-audiences-conservative-playwright#comments> [accessed 27 June 2014]. The article comments are drawn from an earlier interview with Simon Stephens: ‘Award-Winning Playwright Simon Stephens Rewrites Jarry’s King Ubu’, TheatreVOICE, 7 February 2012 <http://www.theatrevoice.com/audio/award-winning-playwright-simon-stephens-rewrites-king-ubu/> [accessed 27 June 2014].
2. Simon Stephens qtd. in Duška Radosavljević, Theatre Making: Interplay between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 205.
3. Michael Billington, ‘The Trial of Ubu – Review’, Guardian, 25 January 2012 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jan/25/the-trial-of-ubu-review> [accessed 24 June 2014]. The Tricycle Theatre has a reputation for staging verbatim work, including several recent plays ‘edited’, rather than ‘written’ by Richard Norton-Taylor that have staged inquiries and tribunals, such as Nuremberg (1996); Called to Account (2007), concerning the legality of the invasion of Iraq; and Tactical Questioning (2011), based on the inquiry into the death of a prisoner in British custody in Iraq.
4. Charles Spencer, ‘The Trial of Ubu, Hampstead Theatre, Review’, 25 January 2012, Telegraph <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9038474/The-Trial-of-Ubu-Hampstead-Theatre-review.html> [accessed 24 June 2014].
5. Milošević was President of Serbia (1989–97) and President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1997–2000). His five-year trial for genocide and crimes against humanity, during which Milošević conducted his own defence as he refused to accept the legitimacy of the court (which had not been convened according to UN agreement), ended without a verdict upon Milošević’s death in his prison cell in 2006.
6. Simon Stephens, The Trial of Ubu (London: Methuen, 2012), p. 45.
7. These review quotes are, respectively, from the website ‘Come-on.de’ and the newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Trouw (Netherlands), but are taken from http://www.tga.nl/en/productions/ubu/pers [accessed 25 June 2014] [URL no longer active]. I am grateful to Simone Schroth for these and subsequent translations from non-English press sources.
8. Spencer, ‘The Trial of Ubu, Review’.
9. TheatreVOICE, ‘Award-Winning Playwright Simon Stephens Rewrites Jarry’s King Ubu’, TheatreVOICE, 7 February 2012 <http://www.theatrevoice.com/audio/award-winning-playwright-simon-stephens-rewrites-king-ubu/> [accessed 27 June 2014].
10. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, English language version by Simon Stephens (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), n.p.
11. Radosavljević, Theatre Making, p. 27.
12. Patrice Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 11.
13. Ibid., p. 4.
14. Of course, rather than offering a closed, fictional world and defined location, some contemporary writers’ texts increasingly have a call to create a directorial mise en scène written into them: Martin Crimp’s work without attributed characters is a clear example. Stephens’s Pornography has an implicit challenge to find a mise en jeu through its openness and fluidity of place and time, despite its ‘seven ages of man’ structure (Stephens has mentioned using Jacques’s speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It as a framework several times in interview). See ‘Pornography – Simon Stephens Interview’, The List, 17 July 2008 <https://www.list.co.uk/article/10159-pornography-simon-stephens-interview/> [accessed 15 February 2015].
15. Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène, p. 47.
16. Ibid.
17. Simon Stephens, ‘Two Kingdoms: England vs Germany’, discussion at ‘Turning the Page: Creating New Writing 1945–2013’, University of Reading, 13 September 2013.
18. Stephens, The Trial of Ubu, n.p.
19. Ibid., n.p.
20. Ibid., p. 57.
21. Simon Stephens, The Trial of Ubu and King Ubu (London: Methuen, 2012), p. 6.
22. Katie Mitchell, unpublished interview with the author, 30 October 2012. Subsequent quotations appear as ‘Mitchell, interview’.
23. Ibid.
24. The production also had a re-rehearsal week in Amsterdam to adapt to the bigger performance space.
25. Stephens, The Trial of Ubu, p. 4.
26. Sebastian Nübling, unpublished interview with the author, 8 March 2015. Subsequent quotations appear as ‘Nübling, interview’.
27. Ibid.
28. In discussion Nübling states that ‘Jarry wrote the Ubu story as a young man […] so I think there’s some kind of teenage wildness that comes from Jarry; he carried that spirit’ (Ibid).
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Stephens, The Trial of Ubu, p. 42.
33. Sebastian Nübling in ‘Theater ist nicht ökonomisch’, Badische Zeitung, 8 March 2013 <http://www.badische-zeitung.de/theater-2/theater-ist-nicht-oekonomisch–69859169.html> [URL no longer active].
34. See TheatreVOICE, ‘Award-Winning Playwright’.
35. Stephens qtd. in Radosavljević, Theatre-Making, p. 205.
36. Mitchell, interview.
37. Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène, p. 48.
38. For an elaboration of Mitchell’s process, see Katie Mitchell, The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre (London: Routledge, 2008).
39. TheatreVOICE, ‘Award-winning Playwright’.
40. David Barnett, ‘Offending the Playwright: Directors’ Theatre and the “Werktreue” Debate’, German Monitor, 77 (2013), 75–97 (p. 91).
41. Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène, p. 295.