Theatre review: Périclès, Prince de Tyr (Cheek by Jowl)

Co-written with a pimp he met down the pub, and only surviving in a reconstructed version from text fragments, Pericles is not exactly one of Shakespeare's best-known plays, and in fact after tonight's performance I've now seen it as many times translated into other languages as I have in the original. The play's hero begins his journey by attempting to get a royal bride by answering a riddle; when the solution gives up a terrible secret he flees, realising that what he's learnt has put his life n danger. After a couple of shipwrecks he ends up finding then losing first a new bride and then a daughter, being betrayed by many of those he considers friends, and finding that the dead have risen. In one of my favourite endearingly batshit insane scenes in all of Shakespeare, having dug themselves into a plot hole he and Wilkins resolve it by having some pirates turn up out of nowhere to abduct the leading lady.

Theatre review: Ubu Roi

Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu Roi is seen as the forerunner to absurdist theatre, a bloodthirsty and scatological satire on greed and tyranny, with a central character who's a cross between Macbeth and Mister Punch. Ubu originated in Jarry's schooldays as a caricature of his teachers, and this informs the way Declan Donnellan frames his production with Cheek By Jowl's French company: Nick Ormerod's set is a pristine, modern Paris apartment, where a dull dinner party is taking place. The story of Ubu becomes the fantasy of a 14-year-old boy who starts by seeking out his home's grubby underside with a video camera (projections on the back wall show us what he finds,) then proceeds to cast himself, his parents and their guests as malevolent puppets. Père Ubu (Christophe Grégoire) has squandered all his money, and his wife (Camille Cayol) convinces him to solve his financial woes by killing King Wenceslas (Vincent de Bouard) and taking the throne of Poland for himself.