In 1888, Alfred Jarry premiered his Ubu Roi, performed by the Puppets of the Theatre of Phynances. More than a hundred years later, British playwright Simon Stephens imagined a sequel for it: O Julgamento de Ubu [The Trial of Ubu] (2010), a play that is now performed by the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto and staged by Nuno M Cardoso. At the start, the scatological nonsense of Jarry’s Ubuesque saga will be conveyed to us through the art of puppetry; later on, human performers will play the trial, sitting Ubu in the dock of an International Criminal Court, thus instigating a collective soul-searching on power and its operations. “This trial. This language. It’s important to you, isn’t it?”, Ubu confronts us. The play of manipulation and scale of puppets and humans delineates a savage satire of the struggle between legal and moral justice that leaves us face to face with the intransigence of Ubu, a symbol for contemporary dictators. “Do you know what is going on in my head as I stand here listening to you talking about justice?”