| Ubu Roi | |
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| Written by | Alfred Jarry |
| Date premiered | December 10, 1896 |
| Place premiered | Paris |
| Original language | French |
| Series | Ubu Cocu Ubu Enchainé |
Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) is a play by Alfred Jarry, premiered in 1896. It is a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd and Surrealism. It is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises power, greed, and their evil practices — in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeois to abuse the authority engendered by success. It was followed by Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded) and Ubu Enchaîné (Ubu Enchained), neither of which was performed during Jarry's 34-year life.
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"The beginnings of the original Ubu," wrote Taylor, "have attained the status of legend within French theatre culture."[1] It was as a student in 1888, at the age of fifteen, that Jarry perused Les Polonais, a brief teacher-ridiculing farce by the brothers Henri (of whom he was a good friend) and Charles Morin. This, one of many plays created around the character of Père Ubu (or Hébé, as he was known at the time), is long lost, so the true and complete authorship of Ubu Roi can never be known. It is clear, however, that Jarry considerably revised and expanded the play, endowed it with the marionette concept and gave its protagonist the handle under which he became famous.
While his schoolmates lost interest in the Ubu legends when they left school, Jarry continued adding to and reworking the material for the rest of his short life. His plays were widely and wildly hated for their scant respect to royalty, religion and society, their vulgarity and scatology,[2] their brutality and low comedy, and their perceived utter lack of literary finish.[3]
"The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world," wrote Jane Taylor. "Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification." Jarry's metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero — fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, cruel, cowardly and evil — who grew out of schoolboy legends about the imaginary life of a hated teacher who had been at one point a slave on a Turkish Galley, at another frozen in ice in Norway and at one more the King of Poland. Ubu Roi follows and explores his political, martial and felonious exploits, offering parodic adaptations of situations and plot-lines from Shakespearean drama, including Macbeth, Hamlet and Richard III: like Macbeth, Ubu—on the urging of his wife—murders the king who helped him and usurps his throne, and is in turn defeated and killed by his son; Jarry also adapts the ghost of the dead king and Fortinbras's revolt from Hamlet, Buckingham's refusal of reward for assisting a usurpation from Richard III and The Winter's Tale's bear.[4]
"There is," wrote Taylor, "a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in the burlesque mode which Jarry invents, there is no place for consequence. While Ubu may be relentless in his political aspirations, and brutal in his personal relations, he apparently has no measurable effect upon those who inhabit the farcical world which he creates around himself. He thus acts out our most childish rages and desires, in which we seek to gratify ourselves at all cost."[5] The derived adjective "ubuesque" is recurrent in French and francophone political debate.
Both Ubu Cocu and Ubu Roi have a convoluted history, going through decades of rewriting and, in the case of the former, never arriving, despite Jarry's exertions, at a definitive version.[6] By the time Jarry wanted Ubu Roi published and staged, the Morins had lost their interest in schoolboy japes, and Henri gave Jarry permission to do whatever he wanted with them. Charles, however, later tried to claim credit, but it had never been a secret that he had had some involvement with the earliest version.
At the play's first night in Paris, on December 10, 1896, Jarry opened with a lengthy, unencouraging and buck-passing speech before the curtain, much to the boredom of the audience. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he said,
it would be superfluous, aside from a certain absurdity in an author's speaking of his own play, for me to come here and preface with a few words this presentation of Ubu Roi, after such famous critics have cared to discuss it — among whom I must thank, and with these few all the others, M.M. Silvestre, Mendès, Scholl, Lorrain and Bauer —, if I did not feel that their benevolence had found Ubu's belly big with more satirical symbols than we can possibly pump up tonight. The Swedenborgian philosopher Mésès has excellently compared rudimentary creations with the most perfect, and embryonic beings with the most complete, in that the former lack all irregularities, protuberances and qualities, which leaves them in more or less spherical form, like the ovum and M. Ubu, while the latter have added so many personal details that they remain equally spherical, following the axiom that the most polished object is that which presents the greatest number of sharp corners. That is why you are free to see in M. Ubu however many allusions you care to, or else a simple puppet — a schoolboy's caricature of one of his professors who personified for him all the ugliness in the world. It is this aspect that the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre will present tonight. Our actors have been willing to depersonalise themselves for two evenings, and to act behind masks, in order to express more perfectly the inner man, the soul of these overgrown puppets you are about to see. The play having been put on prematurely, and with more enthusiasm than anything else, Ubu hasn't had time to get his real mask (which is very inconvenient to wear anyway), and the other characters will be fitted out, like him, somewhat approximately. It seemed very important if we were to be quite like puppets — Ubu Roi is a play that was never written for puppets, but for actors pretending to be puppets, which is not the same thing — for us to have carnival music, and the orchestral parts have been allotted to various brasses, gongs and speaking-trumpet horns that we haven't had time to collect. We don't hold it too much against the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. Mainly we wanted to see Ubu incarnate in the versatile talent of M. Gémier, and tonight and tomorrow night are the only two performances that M. Ginisty and his production of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam have been free to relinquish to us. We will proceed with the three acts that have been rehearsed, and two that have been rehearsed with certain cuts. I have made all the cuts the actors wanted, even cutting several passages indispensible to the meaning and equilibrium of the play, while leaving in at their request certain scenes I would have been glad to cut; for, however much we'd like to be marionettes, we haven't hung all out actors on strings, which, even if it weren't absurd, would have complicated things badly. In the same way, we haven't been too literal about our crowd scenes, whereas in a puppet-show a handful of strings and pulleys will serve to command a whole army. You must expect to see important personages like M. Ubu and the Czar forced to gallop neck-and-neck on cardboard horses that we've spent the night painting in order to supply the action. The first three acts, at least, and the final scenes, will be played complete, as they were written. Our stage setting is very appropriate, because, even though it's an easy trick to lay your scene in eternity, and, for instance, to have someone shoot off a revolver in the year one-thousand-and-such, here you must accept doors that open out on plains covered with snow falling from a clear sky, chimneys adorned with clocks splitting to serve as doors, and palm-trees growing at the foot of bedsteads for little elephants sitting on shelves to munch on. As to our orchestra that isn't here, we'll miss only its brilliance and tone. The themes for Ubu will be performed offstage by various pianos and drums. As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland -- that is to say, nowhere.[7]
After only the first word ("merdre", the French word for "shit", with an extra "R",[8] and meurtre: murder (fr.)) of the play, a riot, which has since become "a stock element of Jarry biographia",[1] broke out. After further rioting during the first (and final) performance, Ubu Roi was outlawed from the stage, and Jarry moved it to a puppet theatre. Debates into its meaning were intense and relentless, but its quality and impact were rarely disputed.
Ubu Roi was the basis for Jan Lenica's animated film Ubu et la grande gidouille (1976) and was later adapted into Jane Taylor's "Ubu and the Truth Commission" (1998), a play critical of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed in response to the atrocities committed during Apartheid. Ubu Roi was also adapted for the film Ubu Król 2003 by Piotr Szulkin, highlighting the grotesque nature of political life in Poland immediately after the fall of communism.
Ubu Roi has been translated most recently by David Ball in the Norton Anthology of Drama (2010), and performed at the University of Virginia the same year; and by Sherry CM Lindquist, an adaptation of whose version was performed in Chicago, at The Public Theater in New York, at the International Festival Of Puppet Theater and at the Edison Theater, St. Louis, Missouri, by Hystopolis Productions, Chicago, from 1996 to '97. When it appeared on BBC2 television in 1976,[9] it seemed programmed for broadcast on the Saturday of an FA Cup Final.
Joan Miro used Ubu Roi as a subject of his 50 1940 lithographs called the Barcelona Series. These pictures could be Ubu Roi but they also satirise General Franco and his generals after he had won the Spanish Civil War.[10]
In her book, Sixties, Linda McCartney explained that Paul read Jarry's play while writing the lyrics for "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".
The American experimental rock group Pere Ubu is named after the main character. Their 2009 album Long Live Père Ubu! is an adaptation of Jarry's play.[11] "City Hobgoblins", a song by Manchester pop group The Fall, contains the Mark E Smith penned lyric "Ubu Roi is a home Hobgoblin." The British band Coil have a song named "Ubu Noir" on their 1984 album Scatology, inspired by the Ubu Roi character.
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