BEING the play that arguably launched "the theatre of the absurd" - and a work that surely defies any literal interpretation - Alfred Jarry's 1896 carnival of grotesquerie is a perfect vehicle for experimentation, writes MIKE PARKER.

Director Jon Hewitt and an outstanding all-female cast from Admiration theatre company have gone for an open-space, propless mixture of speech, sound and mime that works superbly.

Clad in black on a black stage area, the eight women turn the play into a raucous, nightmarish, cartoonish farce, running, tumbling and fighting with an energy that left me feeling exhausted by the end.

Ubu Roi - literally, King Turd - has been accused of being little more than smutty schoolboy humour with it's scatalogical dialogue and vulgar plotting such as poisoning by lavatory brush, a charge that has some validity, given its beginnings as a skit written during Jarry's schooldays. It has also been described as "Macbeth without the conscience or the poetry."

But Jarry's outrageous portrait of murderous greed has a continuing resonance lacking in many more considered, intellectual attacks on political and financial villainy. He cuts to the heart of the basest human instincts, allowing of no weasely moral doubts in Pa and Ma Ubu's determination to achieve power and wealth at whatever cost to others. After murdering the king, the nobles, the judiciary and the financiers, they even decide to go to war because, well, it's in their interests and, anyway, "the people like a good fight."

The message could be that, to begin with, no illusions about human nature means that you will not be disappointed. Draw your own conclusions as to whether that's valid or whether it has any relevance to modern society and politics.

I prefer to see it as an early and extreme version of the Michael Moore approach to political discourse - give the enemy a good kicking because they deserve it and ignore those who tell you to be more "reasonable" because their agenda is almost certainly that you mustn't upset the status quo.

I don't know whether Hewitt and his cast see the play in such stark political terms but, even if they don't, the women manage, brilliantly, to extract the menace in the play, while still making it funny and entertaining.

The second half does go on a little too long, with a little too much rucking, but, for the most part, Kyla Davis, Daniela Garcia Casilda, Katharine Bennett-Fox, Anita Clements, Sylvie Gallant, Suhayla Pezeshk, Sylvia St John and Lisa Lee Thomas do a superb job, ably assisted by Albi Gravener providing atmospheric sax accompaniment and sound effects. It's a show that is well worth a visit.