Long Live Père Ubu! - The Spectacle

Press Quotes

Venue, Tom Phillips
It's funny, garbled, f**ked up, stupid, great. It's quite brilliant - an unlikely music/theatre adventure that veers from the sublime to the ridiculous via spasming dancers, dropped scenes, temper tantrums, theremin-garnished atmospherics, sock puppets, farting, and spacey animation from the Brothers Quay. Astonishingly, it manages both to put across the gist of Jarry's deliriously satirical 1896 play and feature some of the most joyously rebarbative music that Pere Ubu have made since their "Dub Housing" / "New Picnic Time" rule-shredding heyday... Antidotal evidence that with the appropriate chutzpah and humour you can do something different with the basic gig format without ending up with Peter Gabriel dressed as a flower.

Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin)
The small bassist twitches as if struck by St. Vitus' dance. A chicken with a rubber mask plays synthesizers. A horse collapses under King Ubu. The king roars and rolls around on the ground. In between - crazy music.

MusicWeb International
Savage wit. So involving was this piece of music theatre that when someone in the audience was taken ill during the performance, everyone thought it was part of the act, "planted" in the stalls to extend the show, even when a paramedic arrived.

Joe Shooman, Record Collector, October 2009.
"Long Live Père Ubu!" is odd and scary... As the narrative unfolds, so do the atmosphere and sonics, thrown into a white-hot crucible of pretentiously brilliant creativity.

Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
All very anti-theatre and anti-good taste. And what made it all worthwhile? Hearing Thomas in full baritone majesty belching out that one word he was born to deliver: "MERDRE!!!"

Nick Morgan, Whiskyfun
Like pantomime without the ghastly television "celebrities," a sort of Carry On Pataphysics. I've rarely left a theatre feeling quite as entertained.

The Londonist
It's hard not to delight in Thomas' frustrated dictatorship of both Poland and the production itself. Deviating from the plot to demand that the scene fade to black (which it always did, of course, by way of someone running past with a sign reading "Fade To Black"), Thomas displays an enthusiasm for the work that quickly spreads to the audience. When two of the characters exclaimed, "I think we're in danger of alienating the audience!", Queen Elizabeth Hall erupted in laughter. It was hilarious because it couldn't have been further from the truth.