| Ubu Roi | |
|---|---|
 Programme from the première | |
| Written by | Alfred Jarry |
| Date premiered | December 10, 1896 (1896-12-10) |
| Place premiered | Paris |
| Original language | French |
| Series | Ubu Cocu Ubu Enchaîné |
Ubu Roi (French:[ybyʁwa]; "Ubu the King" or "King Ubu") is aplay by French writerAlfred Jarry, then 23 years old. It was first performed in Paris in 1896, byAurélien Lugné-Poe'sThéâtre de l'Œuvre at theNouveau-Théâtre (today, the Théâtre de Paris). The production's single public performance baffled and offended audiences with its unruliness andobscenity. A wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for its overturning of cultural rules, norms and conventions, it is regarded by 20th- and 21st-century scholars as having opened the door for what became known asmodernism in the 20th century, and as a precursor toDadaism,Surrealism and theTheatre of the Absurd.
Ubu Roi was first performed inParis on December 10, 1896, byAurélien Lugné-Poe'sThéâtre de l'Œuvre atNouveau-Théâtre (today, the Théâtre de Paris), 15, rue Blanche, in the9th arrondissement. The play – scheduled for an invited "industry" run-through followed by a single public performance the next night – caused a riotous response in the audience and denunciatory reviews in the days after.[1][2] It is considered a wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms, and conventions. To some of those who were in the audience on opening night, includingW. B. Yeats and the poet and essayistCatulle Mendès, it seemed an event of revolutionary importance, but many were mystified and outraged by the work's seeming childishness, obscenity, and disrespect. It is now seen by some to have opened the door for what became known asmodernism in the 20th century.[3] It is a precursor toDada,Surrealism and theTheatre of the Absurd. It is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises power, greed, and their evil practice – in particular the propensity of the complacentbourgeoisie to abuse the authority engendered by success.
The title is sometimes translated asKing Turd; however, the word "Ubu" is actually merely a nonsense word that evolved from the French pronunciation of the name "Hebert",[4] which was the name of one of Jarry's teachers, the satirical target and inspiration of the first versions of the play.[5]
Jarry made some suggestions regarding how his play should be performed. He wanted King Ubu to wear a cardboard horse's head in certain scenes, "as in the old English theatre", for he intended to "write aguignol". He thought a "suitably costumed person would enter, as in puppet shows, to put up signs indicating the locations of the various scenes". He also wanted costumes with as little specific local colour reference or historical accuracy as possible.[6]
Ubu Roi was followed byUbu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded) andUbu Enchaîné (Ubu in Chains), neither of which was performed during Jarry's 34-year life.[7] One of his later works, a novel/essay on "pataphysics", is offered as an explanation behind the ideas that underpinUbu Roi. Pataphysics is, as Jarry explains, "the science of the realm beyond metaphysics". Pataphysics is a pseudo-science Jarry created to critique members of the academy. It studies the laws that "govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". It is the "science of imaginary solutions".[8]
The story is a parody ofShakespeare'sMacbeth and some parts ofHamlet andKing Lear.
As the play begins, Ubu's wife convinces him to lead a revolution, and kills theKing of Poland and most of the royal family. The King's son, Bougrelas, and the Queen escape, but the latter later dies. The ghost of the dead king appears to his son and calls for revenge. Back at the palace, Ubu, now King, begins heavily taxing the people and killing the nobles for their wealth. Ubu's henchman gets thrown into prison; he then escapes toRussia, where he has theTsar declare war on Ubu. As Ubu heads out to confront the invading Russians, his wife tries to steal the money and treasures in the palace. She is driven away by Bougrelas, who is leading a revolt of the people against Ubu. She runs away to her husband, Ubu, who has, in the meantime, been defeated by the Russians, been abandoned by his followers, and been attacked by a bear. Ubu's wife pretends to be the angel Gabriel, in order to try to scare Ubu into forgiving her for her attempt to steal from him. They fight, and she is rescued by the entrance of Bougrelas, who is after Ubu. Ubu knocks down the attackers with the body of the dead bear, after which he and his wife flee toFrance, which ends the play.
The action contains motifs found in the plays ofShakespeare: a king's murder and a scheming wife fromMacbeth, the ghost fromHamlet, Fortinbras' revolt fromHamlet, the reneging of Buckingham's reward fromRichard III, and the pursuing bear fromThe Winter's Tale. It also includes other cultural references, for example, toSophocles'Oedipus Rex (Œdipe Roi in French) in the play's title.Ubu Roi is considered a descendant of the comic grotesqueFrench Renaissance authorFrançois Rabelais and hisGargantua and Pantagruel novels.[9][10]
The language of the play is a unique mix of slang code-words, puns and near-gutter vocabulary, set to strange speech patterns.[11]
"The beginnings of the original Ubu", writesJane Taylor, "have attained the status of legend within French theatre culture".[7] In 1888, when he became a student at the Lycée in Rennes at the age of fifteen, Jarry encountered a brief farcical sketch,Les Polonais, written by his friend Henri Morin, and Henri's brother Charles. This farce was part of a campaign by the students to ridicule their physics teacher, Félix-Frederic Hébert (1832–1917).[12]Les Polonais depicted their teacher as the King ofan imaginary Poland,[2] and was one of many plays created around Père Hébé, the character that, in Jarry's hands, eventually evolved into King Ubu.Les Polonais was performed as a marionette play by the students at their homes in what they called the "Theatre des Phynances", named in honor of Père Hébert's lust for "phynance" (finance), or money. This prototype forUbu Roi is long-lost, so the true and complete details of the authorship ofUbu Roi may never be known. It is clear, however, that Jarry considerably revised and expanded the play.
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 are controversial for their scant respect to royalty, religion and society, their vulgarity and scatology,[13][14] their brutality and low comedy, and their perceived utter lack of literary finish.[15]
According to Jane Taylor, "the central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification".[7] Jarry's metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero – fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid,jejune, voracious, greedy, 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 aTurkishgalley, at another frozen in ice inNorway and at one more the King ofPoland.Ubu Roi follows and explores his political, martial and felonious exploits.
"There is", writes Taylor, "a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in theburlesque 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".[7] The derived adjective "ubuesque" is recurrent in French andfrancophone political debate.[citation needed]
BothUbu Cocu andUbu 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.[16] By the time Jarry wantedUbu 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. The music was composed and performed at the premiere byClaude Terrasse.[17]
The first word of the play ("merdre", the French word for "shit", with an extra "r") may have been part of the reason for the response to the play in Paris. At the end of the performance a riot broke out, an incident which has since become "a stock element of Jarry biographia".[7] After this,Ubu Roi was outlawed from the stage, and Jarry moved it to a puppet theatre.
Jarry said to the audience in a curtain speech just before that first performance in Paris: "You are free to see in M. Ubu however many allusions you care to, or else a simple puppet—a school boy's caricature of one of his teachers who personified for him all the ugliness in the world".[13]
The poetW. B. Yeats, though he did not understand French, attended the premiere with a companion who interpreted the action for him. He recalled, in his memoirThe Trembling of the Veil, his dismay that the play challenged the symbolist, spiritual-themed literature he advocated: "Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, 'After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.'”[18]
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In 1936Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, the greatPolish modernist and prolific writer and translator created inPolishUbu Król czyli Polacy ("King Ubu, otherwise, The Poles").[19] Some of his phraseology in the play has passed into the language. In 1990, at the invitation of theMunich Opera,Krzysztof Penderecki wrote anopera buffa on Jarry's theme entitledUbu Rex, staged on 8 July 1991 for the opening of theMunich Opera Festival; the opera was later mounted in Poland in 2003.[19]
The first English translation wasUbu Roi. Drama in Five acts followed by the Song of Disembraining, byBarbara Wright, for which she wrote the preface. It was illustrated byFranciszka Themerson and published by theGaberbocchus Press in 1951.[20]
In 1964 theStockholmPuppet theatre produced a highly popular version ofUbu Roi directed by Michael Meschke, with scenery by Franciszka Themerson.[21]
Ubu Roi was translated into Serbian in 1964 byLjubomir Draškić and performed at the Atelje 212 theatre in Belgrade for the next 20 years, untilZoran Radmilović, who played Père Ubu, died. The play was so successful that it was adapted into a movie in 1973.
Ubu Roi was translated intoCzech byJiří Voskovec andJan Werich asKrál Ubu, and premiered in 1928 atOsvobozené divadlo. The play was banned inCzechoslovakia after the1968 Soviet invasion.
The play was the basis forJan Lenica's animated filmUbu et la Grande Gidouille (1976).
In 1976–1977Oakley Hall III translated and adaptedUbu Roi (calledUbu Rex) and its sequels, and directed them in New York CityOff-Off-Broadway and at theLexington Conservatory Theatre inLexington, New York.[22] The adaptations starredRichard Zobel, who also produced the play and created the masks for it.[23]
InLithuania (then part of the USSR) the play was adapted asKaralius Ūbas by directorJonas Vaitkus in 1983.
The play was adapted into anopera, withlibretto byMichael Finnissy andAndrew Toovey and music by Toovey. It was produced by the Banff Centre Theatre, Canada, in collaboration with Music Theatre Wales, in May 1992, directed by Keith Turnbull.
A musical adaptation,Ubu Rock, book by Andrei Belgrader and Shelly Berc, music and lyrics byRusty Magee, premiered at theAmerican Repertory Theater in 1995 and was remounted at ART the following year.
The play was adapted for the Czech filmKrál Ubu, directed by F. A. Brabec in 1996. The film received threeCzech Lion Awards.
Sherry C. M. Lindquist's adaptation was performed in Chicago, atThe Public Theater in New York City, at the International Festival of Puppet Theater, and at the Edison Theater, St. Louis, Missouri, by Hystopolis Productions, Chicago, from 1996 to 1997.
Jane Taylor adaptedUbu Roi asUbu and the Truth Commission (1998), a play addressing the emotional complexities revealed by the process of theSouth AfricanTruth and Reconciliation Commission, which was formed in response to the atrocities committed duringapartheid.
In Poland the play was adapted for the filmUbu Król (2003) byPiotr Szulkin,[24] highlighting the grotesque nature of political life in Poland immediately after the fall of communism.[19]
The play was translated by David Ball inThe Norton Anthology of Drama in 2010, and performed at theUniversity of Virginia the same year.
Inspired by the black comedy of corruption withinUbu Roi, the Puerto Rican absurdist narrativeUnited States of Banana (2011) byGiannina Braschi dramatizes, with over-the-top grotesque flourishes of "pataphysics", the fall of the American Empire and the liberation of Puerto Rico.[25][26]
The play was adapted and directed by Dash Kruck as part of Vena Cava Production's 2013 mainstage season. Performed inBrisbane, Australia, the adaptation made cultural political references to Queensland's PremierCampbell Newman, even including him in the show's promotional poster.[27]
In 2013, the international theatre companyCheek by Jowl created a French-language production of Ubu Roi, directed byDeclan Donnellan and designed byNick Ormerod.[28] The production was presented across Europe, Russia, the United-States and Mexico. It was live-streamed worldwide from theLincoln Center in New York on 26 July 2015.[29] According toThe New York Times "the Cheek by Jowl production asks us to see Jarry’s play through the eyes of a sulky, moody, sexually tormented adolescent, who is pitilessly judgmental of his elders."[30]
In 2014,Toronto'sOne Little Goat Theatre Company producedUbu Mayor: A Harmful Bit of Fun, combining themerde-filled sensibilities ofUbu Roi with the internationally renowned antics, absurdities and obscenities of Toronto's mayorRob Ford and his brotherDoug.
In 2014, the play was adapted into experimental musical productionUbu Sings Ubu, which incorporated music by similarly-inspired rock groupPere Ubu.Ubu Sings Ubu was presented for an encore in 2016.[31]
In 2016, the play was adapted by Jared Strange intoUBU ROY: An American Tale, an updated version of the original play through the lens of the2016 United States presidential election. The show opened November 3, 2016, inLubbock, Texas, as the Lubbock Community Theatre's first play in their "LCT After Dark" season.[32][33]
In 2020, the play was adapted and set in modern-dayTasmania, taking place on a purpose-built stage in theCataract Gorge.
In 2020, the play was also adapted into a musical by Kneehigh Theatre company.
In 2021, the play was condensed and adapted byJen Silverman under the titleUbu Anew (A Play for Strange People) and is featured in Silverman's collectionReal American Dinner Party & Other Short Plays.[34]
In 1923, the Dadaist pioneerMax Ernst produced a painting entitledUbu Imperator.[35]
Between 1952 and 1953, the King Ubu Gallery existed at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco.[36] Founded byRobert Duncan, Jess Collins, and Harry Jacobus, the gallery was an important institution until it was replaced by theSix Gallery, whereAllen Ginsberg first read "Howl."
Alfred Jarry is one of the few real figures to appear among the many literary characters inLes Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1925), byAndré Gide. In Part III, Chapter 8, Jarry attends a literary banquet, where the fictional Comte de Passavant introduces him as the author ofUbu Roi, saying of the literary set, "They have dubbed him a genius because the public have just damned his play. All the same, it's the most interesting thing that's been put on the stage for a long time".[37]
Joan Miró usedUbu Roi as a subject of his 50 lithographs in 1940 called theBarcelona Series. These pictures could be Ubu Roi but they also satiriseGeneral Franco and his generals after he had won theSpanish Civil War.[38]
In her bookLinda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era,Linda McCartney mentions thatPaul had become interested in avant-garde theatre and immersed himself in the writings of Jarry. This is how McCartney discovered the word "pataphysical", which he used in the lyrics of his song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".[39]
The American experimental rock groupPere Ubu is named after the main character. Their 2009 albumLong Live Père Ubu! is an adaptation of Jarry's play.[40]
Dead Can Dance's frontmanBrendan Perry makes a reference to Père Ubu in the song "The Bogus Man" (on his second solo albumArk) with the line "Hail, Father Ubu, here comes the Grand Guignol".
The figure of Ubu Roi, particularly as depicted by Jarry in his woodcut, appears to have inspired the characterOogie Boogie inTim Burton's animated filmThe Nightmare Before Christmas.[41]
Television producerGary David Goldberg named his dog Ubu and his production companyUbu Productions after Ubu Roi.[42]
Australian bandMethyl Ethel's song "Ubu" contains references to the play.[43]
The protagonist ofWalter Jon Williams' novelAngel Station is named Ubu Roy.
InPaul Auster’s last novelBaumgartner (2023), King Ubu is named on page 95 clearly referencingDonald Trump as “King Ubu in the White House”.[citation needed]
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