Young actors get the big picture

Nice house. Nice car. Cool TV. Classy houseguest (a young Russian violinist entering a competition). Excellent food (beluga caviar, homemade gravlax). Ample booze. You know it’s too good to be true.

Bored and testy, the Belgian couple Robert and Rolanda have nothing to say to each other as they await weekend guests at their country home. The guests -- another couple and a poet, along with the violinist -- are not much less dysfunctional themselves. If you’ve already concluded that this is a Flemish “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” waiting to happen, you are right.

But that doesn’t mean you will know how you will feel about “uBUNG,” the work by the Ghent company Victoria that is closing the second UCLA Live International Theatre Festival at the Freud Playhouse. The gimmick here is that, while the dinner party and next-morning drama involving six neurotic characters is acted out on a movie screen, the soundtrack is quickly turned off and the voices we hear are those of six young actors onstage. Ages 11 to 13, they synchronize their parts with what they see on the black-and-white film and look like miniature versions of the characters they mimic.

It’s not parody exactly, although “uBUNG” is full of parodistic elements that generate nervous laughter. It’s not child abuse either, although by American standards, some of the material may seem too sexual or mature for youngsters.

So what is it? I suspect that many who were at the premiere Wednesday night may still be asking that question. I also guess that it affected each of us differently, depending upon what buttons it pushed. The audience was appropriately unanimous in one thing, however -- its rapturous applause. The kids are astonishingly good.

Josse De Pauw, the Flemish actor who wrote and directed “uBUNG” (Practice), has said that he did not intend the children to be judgmental of the adults. Rather, he wanted to see what it would be like to look at an adult situation through the eyes of children. That makes “uBUNG” sound creepy, but it’s not that either.

These are not children spying on adults but, for the moment, being adults as best they can. And it is the best they can that is so peculiar. They seem to get it as Ivo crudely dismisses Robert and Rolanda’s artsy pretensions, as Robert makes a pass at Ivo’s wife, Ria, or as the drunken poet accosts the younger, otherworldly violinist. But these characters are drunk, and the children are sober and utterly self-possessed as they systemically change clothes and jump into their parts.

Ria, a voluptuous blond with fewer hang-ups than the others, tells her sullen companions at the breakfast table the next morning that the events of the previous night were simply what happens to adults when a lifetime’s worth of bottled-up little problems emerge. She insists they get over it. After all, nothing that terrible occurred.

It is an amazingly convincing speech delivered by a girl too young to have lived any of this. For the moment, it is possible to believe that the kids are the adults purged of experience. But only for the moment.

Perhaps one analogy might be that “uBUNG” is the emotional equivalent of wearing glasses that turn everything upside down. The eye makes adjustments on its own, but you can never feel secure because you always know that the second you take them off, the world will flip over once more. That is exactly what happens at the curtain call. Any adjustment we may have made is toppled when we see the children as children.

But let’s celebrate them: Arne Kinds, Amber Van De Veire, Emilio De Baudringhien, Annelies De Baere, Niels Pyck and Stefaan de Rycke. What talents they have.

The elegant film, directed by De Pauw and starring him as the existentially distracted Robert, has English translations of the Flemish text superimposed on the top, not the bottom, where subtitles are in foreign cinema. You get used to them but can’t ignore them. They are but one more confusion in this disorienting, unforgettable but, curiously, only mildly disturbing production.

*

‘uBUNG’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Westwood

When: Today-Saturday, 8 p.m.

Price: $30-$45

Contact: (310) 825-2101

Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes