One of the preliminary designs created by Sally Jacobs for a production of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi,one of a series of plays presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in its 1964 Theatre of Cruelty Season at L.A.M.D.A. (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art).

The Theatre of Cruelty Season was led by Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz. They aimed to explore ways in which ideas first advocated by the French playwright, actor and director, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) could be used to find new forms of expression and retrain the performer. The result was a showing of 'works in progress' made up of improvisations and sketches.

Ubu Roi, one of the precursors of the Theatre of the Absurd and the surrealist art movement of the early 20th century, is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises power, greed and their evil practices. It created a scandal when first performed at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre in Paris in 1896. Critics were divided between those who compared it to Rabelais and Shakespeare (Père and Mère Ubu like the Macbeths without consciences or poetry), and those who dismissed it as rubbish and a degenerate joke. With its bad language and schoolboy humour, the play tells the farcical story of Père Ubu, an officer of the King of Poland (thought to epitomise the mediocrity and stupidity of middle-class officialdom). Aided and abetted by his wife, Père Ubu kills the King and claims the throne. Having amassed a great fortune by executing his subjects and seizing their property, he is finally driven out by the whole Russian Army and flees across Europe.