Ubu Roi

"Ubu Roi" (King Ubu) is a play by Alfred Jarry. It first appeared in 1896 and is widely thought to be the theatrical herald of the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist art movements, whose proponents hold it in especially high regard, championing it since the 1920s as the first in the absurdist tradition. It is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises European philosophies and their absurd 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 his 34-year life.

Character

"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, supported by his wife, murders the king who helped him on the urging of his wife, usurps his throne and is in turn defeated and killed by his sons; 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. [Innes (1993, 24).]

"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." [Taylor 2007, pp. 3-4.]

Legend

"The beginnings of the original Ubu," wrote Taylor, "have attained the status of legend within French theatre culture." [Taylor 2007, p. iii.] 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 (with whom he was a good friend) and Charles Morin. This, one of many plays written 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, [Ubu carries as his weapons a pshittasword and a pshittashook, while his sceptre takes the traditional form of a commode scrubber; at one point, he thrusts his conscience down said commode. His peers, meanwhile, bear such names as MacNure, Pissweet and Pissale.] their brutality and low comedy, and their perceived utter lack of literary finish. ["Ubu Roi" has a loose narrative thread, a large number of characters who appear for only a short scene, and a mash-up of high literature and slang, much of it invented.]

Première

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. [The third play was the only one wholly written by the adult Jarry.] 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. [Reproduced in Jarry 2003, pp. 1-3.]

After only the first word ("merdre", the French word for "shit", with an extra "R" [Some English translations use the spelling "shittr" or other variations] ) of the play, a riot, which has since become "a stock element of Jarry biographia", [Taylor 2007, p. iii.] broke out. After further rioting during the second (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 oppugned.

Adaptions and references in popular culture

"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 by Sherry CM Lindquist, an adaptation of whose version was performed in Chicago, at the Joseph Papp 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, [ [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442852/ Internet Movie Database entry: Ubu Roi (1976)] ] it seemed programmed for broadcast on the Saturday of an FA Cup Final.Fact|date=August 2007

The derived word "ubuesque" is recurrent in French and francophone political debate (e.g. [http://www.humanite.fr/1998-12-08_Politique_La-crise-du-FN-s-envenime] , [http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/depeches/economie/20070305.FAP7646/airbus_jeanmarie_le_pen_veut_laisser_les_professionnels.html] , [http://www.lapresseaffaires.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070130/CPOPINIONS/70130028/6053/CPOPINIONS&template=printart&print=1] , [http://www.crldht.org/article.php3?id_article=20] ). Ubu also lent his name to the "avant-garage" rock band Pere Ubu of Cleveland. The British band Blurt, meanwhile, have a song named "Ubu" on their debut album "In Berlin".

In her book, "Sixties", Linda McCartney explained that Paul read Jarry's play while writing the lyrics for "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".

Ubu Productions took their name from "Ubu Roi", with their "mascot" (a black Labrador dog) featuring on the title credits with a man's voice saying, "Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog!", followed by a dog's bark.

Josh Costello adapted Alfred Jarry's plays for the Shotgun Players production, "Ubu for President" in 2008, first presented in John Hinkel Park, Berkeley, California.

Cast

:Personnages
* Père Ubu
* Mère Ubu
* Capitaine Bordure
* Le Roi Venceslas, La Reine Rosemonde
* Boleslas, Bougrelas, Ladislas - leurs fils
* Le général Lascy
* Stanislas Leczinski
* Jean Sobieski
* Nicolas Rensky
* L'Empereur Alexis
* Giron, Pile, Cotice - Palotins
* La Machine à décerveler
* Le Commandant
* Michel Fédérovitch
* Nobles
* Magistrats
* Financiers
* Conseillers
* Toute l'Armée russe
* Toute l'Armée polonaise
* Les Gardes de la Mère Ubu
* Un Capitaine
* L'Ours
* Le Cheval à Phynances
* L'Equipage
* Conjurés & Soldats
* Peuple
* Larbins de Phynances
* Paysans col-2 :Characters
* Papa Ubu
* Mama Ubu
* Captain Bordure
* King Wenceslas and Queen Rosemonde
* Their sons Boleslas, Boggerlas, and Ladislas
* General Laski
* Stanislas Leczinsky
* Johannes Sobiesky
* Nicholas Rensky
* Emperor Alexei
* Palotins: Giron, Pile, Cotice
* The Disembraining Machine
* The Ship's Captain
* Michael Fedorovitch
* Nobles
* Magistrates
* Phynanciers
* Councilors
* The Whole Russian Army
* The Whole Polish Army
* Mama Ubu's Guards
* A Captain
* A Bear
* The Phynancial Horse
* The Crew
* Conspirators and Soldiers
* Crowds
* Lackeys of Phynance
* Peasants col-end

Bibliography

*Jarry, Alfred. "Ubu Roi". Translated by Beverly Keith and Gershon Legman. Dover, 2003.
*Innes, Christopher. "Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992". London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 0415065186.
*Taylor, Jane. "Ubu and the Truth Commission". Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007.

Notes

External links

* [http://www.smith.edu/metamorphoses/ball2.html UBU-ing a Theatre-Translation: Defense and Illustration] by David Ball (with his translation of the first act). [http://www.smith.edu/metamorphoses/index.html Metamorphoses] , [http://www.smith.edu/metamorphoses/spring2001.html Spring 2001 (9.1)] .
* in the original French