When Ubu Roi written by Alfred Jarry (1873 -1907)* was first produced in Paris in December 1896 the audience rioted at both preview and opening night performances, after which future productions of the play were banned for more than a decade.
Why did they riot? For one thing, the first word of the play is “Merdre” which is the French “Merd,” the equivalent of the English “Shit,” with an extra syllable added. They heard that, suffered a crises of composure, and never recovered because that was merely the first of a five-act attack on royalty, religion, and social mores, that comprise the play. Ubu Roi might be considered lewd. And parts of it remain shocking and offensive even to this day (September 10, 2010. 10:11 AM) in an age when the word “Shit” has morphed into a greeting for friends on the street (as in “Sheee-it, man, wus up?”)
Ubu Roi changed the world, not just the world of theatre, but the whole world as Jarry’s influence spread to other arts and then to society as a whole. Pablo Picasso, whose sketch of Jarry should have appeared above, (but is somehow missing) was fascinated by the work and bought many of Jarry’s manuscripts and possessions, most famously his pearl handled guns, after Jarry died.
Ubu,(pronounced Oo-boo) is the name of the protagonist. Ubu and his wife. are the principal characters, Père and Mère Ubu are often translated into English as Pa and Ma.
The title Ubu Roi is usually translated as Ubu the King. Jarry wrote two more Ubu plays – Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded) 1901 and Ubu Enchaîné (Ubu Enchained or Slave Ubu) 1900, neither of which was performed during his lifetime, and which are incoherent to the point of being un-performable. Jarry, it will be noted, was a known drinker, enthusiast and popularizer of absinthe. A 1901 puppet version of Ubu Roi called “Ubu Sur La Butte” or Ubu on the Hill, was allowed to run for 84 performances because it wasn’t being performed by live humans, Precisely who the authorities thought were manipulating and doing the voices for the puppets remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma, carried by a man on horseback, dressed head to toe in white silk, singing “The Battle Hymn of The Republic”, but their descendants must be the people who decided that Bert and Ernie were gay. This was the same Ubu that Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and other many other younger artists of Paris saw during that one performance and every day (or so), as one of their friends.
Much has been written about translation, even of words like Père, Mère, Roi, and others that people learn during their first year studying French, The reason is that translating Jarry is extremely difficult because every word matters. Ubu Roi is not so much written in French as it is concocted from words and sounds, meaning that language is made to carry its original meanings and much more.
Over the past century many productions of Ubu Roi have tried to sanitize and flatten Jarry’s play in every conceivable way. Some feel Ubu works better with puppets than with human actors: It’s an unusual play. Not really so much a play as a collection of often non sequiturious lines that work very well coming from puppets. If an actor has to say the lines, he or she might ask what motivates a particular line of dialogue. Dialogue from a puppet may be a little easier for audiences to digest. Or not.
“[Ubu is] the most extraordinary thing seen in the theatre in a long time.”
-André Gide, (1869 - 1952), novelist, essayist and winner of the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1947.
Ubu Roi caused a full blown riot when first performed in Paris in 1896, and it retains its power to disrupt even to this day. The first run of Ubu Roi lasted two performances, and young artists and writers like Picasso and Apollinaire who attended, were (and said they were) inspired by the work.
The play has an inherent silliness, a clowning aspect, while keeping all the ideas Jarry was exploring about greed and the abuse of power intact.
Jarry’s Père Ubu was inspired by an unpopular teacher at Jarry’s school. And much of the rude schoolboy humor that fed Jarry’s imagination has tremendous influence on both high art and popular entertainment today.
The tradition of theatrical anarchy that Jarry started are preserved is loudly echoed in our modern art and writing. Whoever writes Homer Simpson’s dialogue and SJ Perelman who wrote Duck Soup for the Marx Brothers, had to have been aware of Ubu, Even though the play is more than 100 years old it is still very much alive.
* Jarry was born on September 8, 1873. If he were alive today he would be
have just turned 137.
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