Ubu Roi (1896), by Alfred Jarry, the first modern play in a theatricalist avant-garde tradition.
I was first introduced to Ubu Roi ("King Ubu") on MTV in pieces shown on Liquid Television, a groundbreaking experimental animation and variety show that aired on MTV in the early 1990s, known for its eclectic and avant-garde programming, often featuring animated shorts and strange, disjointed sequences.
My niece, an actress, who has been on various TV shows and in plays, once performed in Manhattan in a play by Jean Genet, "The Balcony" (Le Balcon), written in 1956. Genet’s "The Balcony", influenced by the Theatre of Cruelty, is often associated with absurdist and surrealist theater, much like Jarry’s work, and explores themes of power, authority, and performance.
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Alfred Jarry Ubu Roi 1965 Experimental Theatre
Ubu Roi ([yby ʁwa]; "Ubu the King" or "King Ubu") is a play by French writer Alfred Jarry, then 23 years old. It was first performed in Paris in 1896, by Aurélien Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre at the Nouveau-Théâtre (today, the Théâtre de Paris). The production's single public performance baffled and offended audiences with its unruliness and obscenity.
Considered to be a wild, bizarre, and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms, and conventions, it is seen by 20th- and 21st-century scholars to have opened the door for what became known as modernism in the 20th century, and as a precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd.
In English
A shocking political satire about a pompous, megalomaniacal tyrant who uses deceitful means to seize the reins of power in the country of… Poland?
iDiOM Theater joins the Bad Hombres and Nasty Women’s Theater Resistance Movement producing a number of performances and readings of this controversial absurdist satire across the country on February 20, 2017: Presidents’ Day.
UBU ROI originally debuted in Paris on December 9, 1896 and closed the next day amid riots, walkouts, and threats of violence (some of which may have been staged by the plays producers).
The show tells the story of a power-hungry buffoon of a ruler who lays waste to his newly-conquered kingdom thanks to his greed and self-indulgence, and is considered influential on the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Theatre of the Absurd movements.
by Pericles Lewis
Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu was the first modern play in a theatricalist avant-garde tradition that deliberately called attention to the artificiality of theatrical conventions, in order to celebrate them. At its first performance, in Paris, on December 10, 1896, the audience broke into factions after the main character, Father Ubu, uttered the first word of the play: “Shite” (“Merdre”). In a grotesque parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Ubu, a dimwitted bourgeois based loosely on Jarry’s high school physics teacher, is convinced by his wife (a “hag”) to declare himself king of Poland. Father Ubu repeats the word “shite” over and over (along with a range of other obscenities), and slaughters 300 nobles and 500 magistrates by shoving them down a trap door. The play’s obscenity and violence may have been enough on their own to cause a riot. What made the play particularly bizarre, however, was its rejection of most of the nineteenth-century methods for creating the illusion of reality on the stage. Jarry described his ideal staging of the play as follows:
A mask for the chief character, Ubu… A cardboard horse’s head, which he would hang around his neck, as in the old English theatre, for the only two equestrian scenes, both these suggestions being in the spirit of the play, since I intended to write a “guignol” [Punch and Judy puppet show]… A suitably costumed person would enter, as in puppet shows, to put up signs indicating the locations of the various scenes… Costumes with as little specific local color reference or historical accuracy as possible.[1]
In addition, Jarry wanted to do away with realistic sets, have crowds of soldiers represented by a single soldier on each side, and have Ubu speak with an unusual accent or voice. All of these innovations, drawn from the early modern stage or from puppet shows, were intended to break with theatrical realism, to call attention to the artificiality of the play. Yeats, who attended the first performance (though he did not speak French well), later wrote: “The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet [toilet].” Although Yeats supported the play, preferring to stay on the side of the avant-garde, he wondered later that night what experiments would come after his own symbolist generation. His answer: “After us the Savage God.”[2] The avant-garde tradition established by Jarry was developed during and after the war by futurists, dadaists, and surrealists.[3]
↑ Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, ed. and trans., Modern French Theatre (New York: Dutton, 1966), pp. x-xi.
↑ Quoted in Benedikt and Wellwarth, eds., Modern French Theatre, p. xiii. See also Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama Since 1870 (Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 136-39.
↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 197.
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