Ubu Roi is a play

Play (theatre)

A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...

 by Alfred Jarry

Alfred Jarry

Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side....

, premiered in 1896. It is a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd

Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...

 and Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

. 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.

Development

"The beginnings of the original Ubu," wrote Taylor, "have attained the status of legend within French theatre culture." 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, their brutality and low comedy, and their perceived utter lack of literary finish.

Ubu

"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

Evil

Evil is the violation of, or intent to violate, some moral code. Evil is usually seen as the dualistic opposite of good. Definitions of evil vary along with analysis of its root motive causes, however general actions commonly considered evil include: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing,...

 — 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

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 Galley, at another frozen in ice in Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 and at one more the King of Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

. Ubu Roi follows and explores his political, martial and felonious exploits, offering parodic adaptations of situations and plot-lines from Shakespearean drama

Shakespeare's plays

William Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. Traditionally, the 37 plays are divided into the genres of tragedy, history, and comedy; they have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being...

, including Macbeth

Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...

, Hamlet

Hamlet

The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...

and Richard III

Richard III (play)

Richard III is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1591. It depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of Richard III of England. The play is grouped among the histories in the First Folio and is most often classified...

: 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

The Winter's Tale

The Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare, originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, some modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some critics, among them W. W...

's bear.

"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." The derived adjective "ubuesque" is recurrent in French and francophone political debate.

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. 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

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, 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

Catulle Mendès

Catulle Mendès was a French poet and man of letters.Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, he was born in Bordeaux. He early established himself in Paris and promptly attained notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's...

, Scholl

Aurélien Scholl

Aurelien Scholl , was a French author and journalist.He was successively editor of the Voltaire and of the Echo de Paris...

, 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

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 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.

After only the first word ("merdre", the French word for "shit", with an extra "R", and meurtre: murder (fr.)) of the play, a riot, which has since become "a stock element of Jarry biographia", 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.

Adaptations

Ubu Roi was the basis for Jan Lenica

Jan Lenica

Jan Lenica was a Polish graphic designer and cartoonist.A graduate of the Architecture Department of Warsaw Polytechnic, Lenica became a poster illustrator and a collaborator on the early animation films of Walerian Borowczyk. From 1963 - 1986 he lived and worked in France, while from 1987 he...

's animated film Ubu et la grande gidouille (1976

1976 in film

The year 1976 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*March 22 - Filming begins on George Lucas' Star Wars science fiction film...

) and was later adapted into Jane Taylor's "Ubu and the Truth Commission

Ubu and the Truth Commission

Ubu and the Truth Commission is a South African play by Jane Taylor first performed under the directorship of William Kentridge at The Laboratory in Johannesburg's Market Theatre on May 26, 1997....

" (1998), a play critical of the South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

n 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

Piotr Szulkin

Piotr Szulkin is a Polish film director. He directed over 30 movies and received about 50 awards, Polish and international, including Best science-fiction Film Director at Eurocon, 1984...

, 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

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, at the International Festival Of Puppet Theater and at the Edison Theater, St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...

, by Hystopolis Productions, Chicago, from 1996 to '97. When it appeared on BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

2 television in 1976, it seemed programmed for broadcast on the Saturday of an FA Cup

FA Cup

The Football Association Challenge Cup, commonly known as the FA Cup, is a knockout cup competition in English football and is the oldest association football competition in the world. The "FA Cup" is run by and named after The Football Association and usually refers to the English men's...

Final.

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

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

External links

• UBU-ing a Theatre-Translation: Defense and Illustration by David Ball (with his translation of the first act). Metamorphoses, Spring 2001 (9.1). in the original French
• DVD of "UBUS" play by the portuguese TNSJ subtitles in english.