Review: Ibi the Great

Keeping in mind the fiercely provocative and politically engaged opus of the director Andraš
Urban, it seems at first glance like a perfect match that he decided to direct Alfred Jarry's
King Ibi at the Sombor National Theatre. First performed in Paris in 1896, Jarry's play
anticipated theatre of the absurd, more than 50 years before the official movement. As it
happens, Urban's performances usually spotlight the absurdity of our contemporary political
life, afflicted by nationalism, misogyny and blatant corruption. King Ibi also satirizes in a
pseudo-Shakespearean way authoritarian state leaders that are so present today, both in
Southeast Europe and beyond. The play also has a rich layer of irony and self-parody that
deconstructs classical theatre structures, which is a thread also consistently found in Urban's
work.

In that manner of parody and provocation, the performance Ibi the Great (renamed for this
adaptation) doesn't start with a scene between Ibi and Mother Ibi in which they frenetically
swear and scheme the murder and overthrow of King Wenceslas (that comes later). Instead,
the actor Nikola Knežević insults the audience, telling them that they don't know anything
about contemporary theatre and that, hence, he's there to explain them. He throughs the facts
about Jarry's play and underlines that it has nothing to do with us and our society. The play is
set in Poland, we're in Serbia. Poles are Catholics, we are Orthodox. They have 38 million
people, we have 7 (wait, is that with or without Kosovo?) They banned abortion, we
haven't yet banned abortion. Shortly after, Nemanja Bakić who plays Ibi enters with a
soliloquy on how he adores Sombor's audience, only for his claims to be subverted by other
actors who force him to admit that he uses the same cheap phrases for the audience in
Belgrade.

But this meta performance roughly represents a fourth or a third of Ibi the Great, while the
rest of the show is an actual adaptation of Jarry's story that clearly, no matter what you are
told at the beginning, represents a metaphor of our regressive, authoritarian society. And if
you don't realize this obvious metaphor... well, then you really don't know anything about
contemporary theatre. The grotesque as a means of social critique is so vivid (and, yes,
sometimes disgusting) that Jarry is probably turning in his grave because he didn't come up
with these solutions. Ibi pours a torrent of shit from a toilet seat into other characters' plates,
which they are obliged to voraciously eat because this is a royal feast (set design by Urban is
a toilet with a row of toilet seats and white tiles). Later there are numerous scenes where
Bakić as Ibi energetically sings about his glory and his craft to rob the state and destroy every
element of a democratic society, from the judiciary and a stable economy to peace. The
musical background (Irena Popović Dragović) is folk because Ibi is a "people's man", played
by Strahinja Rašić's accordion. A particularly evocative scene is the one where Ibi is
surrounded by his hanged victims ("played" by puppets) with whom he plays a council
meeting, animating the corpses so they can praise him.

One might ask how are the metaperformative elements connected to this grimdark burlesque
of shittiness, cynicism and violence. There might be a distant connection where the violence
portrayed in the Ibi story resonates with the theatre artists' treatment of the audience or the
self-ironic comments about the director's mistreatment of actors. But the truth is that these
two parts feel like two parallel performances that are brought unjustifiably together
(dramaturgy: Vedrana Božinović). When Urban directed Wanton Lady's Knights, he
dedicated the whole show to the clash between classical and contemporary approaches to
theatre and the (mis)treatment of actors and the audience. But Ibi the Great feels like he didn't
say everything he intended in Wanton Lady's Knights, so he just put those elements in this
show too. Some self-ironic comments can also feel counterproductive or defensive. There's a
moment when Danica Grubački, who plays Mother Ibi and several other roles, speaks from a
perspective of her pseudo-private character that she's forced to be naked and sexualized
during the performance, and then the moment quickly passes to another topic. It seems as the
director tries to innoculate himself from any potential criticism that he's objectifying women
(did you notice how Urban sexualizes actresses? – oh, he mentioned that himself in the
performance, dibs on him!)

There is a lot of talent used in the creation of this performance, with a special emphasis on the
actors who skillfully switch between different roles they were given. Most notably, Bakić
gives a hundred and one percent of his energy to convincingly play the amok but charismatic
Ibi, that he could even dial down his performance a bit for future occasions. But the show as a
whole oscillates between two insufficiently connected parts; and the grotesque that makes the
majority of the show is sometimes darkly funny and provocative, but on another occasion
feels like a scene from farcical reality TV. Urban achieved great accomplishment in his
performance Hasan-Aga's Wife where he made a punk heroine of a female character stuck in
an ultra-conservative environment. In The Patriots he made a clever actualization of the 19th-
century nationalists fighting against an empire into a story of modern-day Serbian
nationalism. A fair number of positive examples might follow. But in Ibi the Great he just
showed us what we already knew, that we live in a dark, corrupt, anti-utopian society. He just
made the shit look deeper.

Borisav Matić