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Ubu Roi | |
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![]() Programme from the première | |
Written by | Alfred Jarry |
Date premiered | December 10, 1896 |
Place premiered | Paris |
Original language | French |
Series | Ubu Cocu Ubu Enchaîné |
Ubu Roi (French: [ybyʁwa] ; "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.
Ubu Roi was first performed in Paris on December 10, 1896, by Aurélien Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre at Nouveau-Théâtre (today, the Théâtre de Paris), 15, rue Blanche, in the 9th 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, including W. B. Yeats and the poet and essayist Catulle 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 as modernism in the 20th century. [3] It is a precursor to Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre 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 complacent bourgeoisie to abuse the authority engendered by success.
The title is sometimes translated as King 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 a guignol ". 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 by Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded) and Ubu 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 underpin Ubu 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 of Shakespeare's Macbeth and some parts of Hamlet and King Lear .
As the play begins, Ubu's wife convinces him to lead a revolution, and kills the King 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; who then escapes to Russia, where he has the Tsar 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 to France, which ends the play.
The action contains motifs found in the plays of Shakespeare: a king's murder and a scheming wife from Macbeth, the ghost from Hamlet, Fortinbras' revolt from Hamlet, the reneging of Buckingham's reward from Richard III , and the pursuing bear from The Winter's Tale . It also includes other cultural references, for example, to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (Œdipe Roi in French) in the play's title. Ubu Roi is considered a descendant of the comic grotesque French Renaissance author François Rabelais and his Gargantua 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", writes Jane 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 of an 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 for Ubu Roi is long-lost, so the true and complete details of the authorship of Ubu 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 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.
"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 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". [7] The derived adjective "ubuesque" is recurrent in French and francophone political debate.
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. [16] 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. The music was composed and performed at the premiere by Claude 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 poet W. B. Yeats, though he did not understand French, attended the premiere with a companion who interpreted the action for him. He recalled, in his memoir The 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 1936 Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, the great Polish modernist and prolific writer and translator created in Polish Ubu 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 the Munich Opera, Krzysztof Penderecki wrote an opera buffa on Jarry's theme entitled Ubu Rex , staged on 8 July 1991 for the opening of the Munich Opera Festival; the opera was later mounted in Poland in 2003. [19]
The first English translation was Ubu Roi. Drama in Five acts followed by the Song of Disembraining, by Barbara Wright, for which she wrote the preface. It was illustrated by Franciszka Themerson and published by the Gaberbocchus Press in 1951. [20]
In 1964 the Stockholm Puppet theatre produced a highly popular version of Ubu Roi directed by Michael Meschke, with scenery by Franciszka Themerson. [21]
Ubu Roi was translated into Serbian in 1964 by Ljubomir Draškić and performed at the Atelje 212 theatre in Belgrade for the next 20 years, until Zoran Radmilović, who played Père Ubu, died. The play was so successful that it was adapted into a movie in 1973.
Ubu Roi was translated into Czech by Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich as Král Ubu, and premiered in 1928 at Osvobozené divadlo. The play was banned in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion.
The play was the basis for Jan Lenica's animated film Ubu et la Grande Gidouille (1976).
In 1976–1977 Oakley Hall III translated and adapted Ubu Roi (called Ubu Rex) and its sequels, and directed them in New York City Off-Off-Broadway and at the Lexington Conservatory Theatre in Lexington, New York. [22] The adaptations starred Richard Zobel, who also produced the play and created the masks for it. [23]
In Lithuania (then part of the USSR) the play was adapted as Karalius Ūbas by director Jonas Vaitkus in 1983.
The play was adapted into an opera, with libretto by Michael Finnissy and Andrew 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 by Rusty Magee, premiered at the American Repertory Theater in 1995 and was remounted at ART the following year.
The play was adapted for the Czech film Král Ubu, directed by F. A. Brabec in 1996. The film received three Czech Lion Awards.
Sherry C. M. Lindquist's adaptation was performed in Chicago, at The 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 adapted Ubu Roi as Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998), a play addressing the emotional complexities revealed by the process of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was formed in response to the atrocities committed during apartheid.
In Poland the play was adapted for the film Ubu Król (2003) by Piotr 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 in The Norton Anthology of Drama in 2010, and performed at the University of Virginia the same year.
Inspired by the black comedy of corruption within Ubu Roi, the Puerto Rican absurdist narrative United States of Banana (2011) by Giannina 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 in Brisbane, Australia, the adaptation made cultural political references to Queensland's Premier Campbell Newman, even including him in the show's promotional poster. [27]
In 2013, the international theatre company Cheek by Jowl created a French-language production of Ubu Roi, directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod. [28] The production was presented across Europe, Russia, the United-States and Mexico. It was live-streamed worldwide from the Lincoln Center in New York on 26 July 2015. [29] According to The 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's One Little Goat Theatre Company produced Ubu Mayor: A Harmful Bit of Fun, combining the merde-filled sensibilities of Ubu Roi with the internationally renowned antics, absurdities and obscenities of Toronto's mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug.
In 2016, the play was adapted by Jared Strange into UBU ROY: An American Tale, an updated version of the original play through the lens of the 2016 United States presidential election. The show opened November 3, 2016, in Lubbock, Texas, as the Lubbock Community Theatre's first play in their "LCT After Dark" season. [31] [32]
In 2020, the play was adapted and set in modern-day Tasmania, taking place on a purpose-built stage in the Cataract Gorge.
In 2020, the play was also adapted into a musical by Kneehigh Theatre company.
In February 2020, the Vernal & Sere Theatre staged a world-premiere adaptation in Atlanta, Georgia called UBU, which imagined the titular character of King Ubu as a principal walking the halls of a quintessential American school and called into question the fundamental system by which the United States governs and instructs its citizenry.
In 2021, the play was condensed and adapted by Jen Silverman under the title Ubu Anew (A Play for Strange People) and is featured in Silverman's collection Real American Dinner Party & Other Short Plays. [33]
In 1923, the Dadaist pioneer Max Ernst produced a painting entitled Ubu Imperator. [34]
Between 1952 and 1953, the King Ubu Gallery existed at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. [35] Founded by Robert Duncan, Jess Collins, and Harry Jacobus, the gallery was an important institution until it was replaced by the Six Gallery, where Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl."
Alfred Jarry is one of the few real figures to appear among the many literary characters in Les Faux-Monnayeurs ( The Counterfeiters , 1925), by André Gide. In Part III, Chapter 8, Jarry attends a literary banquet, where the fictional Comte de Passavant introduces him as the author of Ubu 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". [36]
Joan Miró used Ubu Roi as a subject of his 50 lithographs in 1940 called the Barcelona Series. These pictures could be Ubu Roi but they also satirise General Franco and his generals after he had won the Spanish Civil War. [37]
In her book Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era, Linda McCartney mentions that Paul 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". [38]
The American experimental rock group Pere Ubu is named after the main character. Their 2009 album Long Live Père Ubu! is an adaptation of Jarry's play. [39]
Dead Can Dance's frontman Brendan Perry makes a reference to Père Ubu in the song "The Bogus Man" (on his second solo album Ark ) 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 character Oogie Boogie in Tim Burton's animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas . [40]
Television producer Gary David Goldberg named his dog Ubu and his production company Ubu Productions after Ubu Roi. [41]
Australian band Methyl Ethel's song "Ubu" contains references to the play. [42]
The protagonist of Walter Jon Williams' novel Angel Station is named Ubu Roy.
One of the SCP Foundation's 001 proposals, "The Last Ride of the Day" features a creature named SCP-UBU after Ubu Roi. SCP-UBU is an invincible and sadistic entity that tortures humanity for centuries.
In Paul Auster’s last novel Baumgartner (2023) King Ubu is named on page 95 clearly referencing Donald J. Trump as “King Ubu in the White House”.
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Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), often cited as a forerunner of the Dada, Surrealist, and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s and later the Theatre of the absurd In the 1950s and 1960s. He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics.
'Pataphysics is a sardonic "philosophy of science" invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the "science of imaginary solutions".
Stefan Themerson was a Polish writer of children's literature, poet and inventor of Semantic Poetry, novelist, script writer filmmaker, composer and philosopher. He wrote in at least three languages. With his wife, Franciszka Themerson, they are regarded as leading husband-and-wife exponents of European Surrealism and publishers.
Pere Ubu is an American rock group formed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975. The band had a variety of long-term and recurring band members, with singer David Thomas being the only member staying throughout the band's lifetime. They released their debut album The Modern Dance in 1978 and followed with several more LPs before disbanding in 1982. Thomas reformed the group in 1987, continuing to record and tour.
Ubu or UBU may refer to:
Barbara Winifred Wright was an English translator of modern French literature.
Franciszka Themerson was a Polish, later British, painter, illustrator, filmmaker and stage designer.
Simon Watson Taylor was an English actor and translator, often associated with the Surrealist movement. He was born in Wallingford, Oxfordshire and died in London.
Cheek by Jowl is an international theatre company founded in the United Kingdom by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod in 1981. Donnellan and Ormerod are Cheek by Jowl's artistic directors and together direct and design all of Cheek by Jowl's productions. The company's recent productions include an Italian-language version of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, Russian-language productions of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, an English-language production of The Winter's Tale and a French-language production of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Cheek by Jowl is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and an Associate Company of the Barbican Centre, London.
Ubu Rex is a satirical opera by Krzysztof Penderecki, on a libretto in German by the composer and Jerzy Jarocki, based on Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu Roi. It uses models by Offenbach, Rossini, Shostakovich and Schnittke. The opera was premiered by the Bavarian State Opera on 6 July 1991 for the opening of the Munich Opera Festival, conducted by Michael Boder. The Polish premiere was 1993 in Grand Theatre, Łódź, conducted by Antoni Wicherek and directed by Lech Majewski.
Haris Pašović is a Bosnian theatre director. Over the course of his career, he has also worked as a playwright, producer, choreographer, performer, and designer. He is best known for his productions of Wedekind's “Spring Awakening”. He is the artistic leader of the East West Theatre Company in Sarajevo and tenured Professor of Directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo.
Ubu and the Truth Commission is a South African play by Jane Taylor. It was first produced on 26 May 1997, directed by William Kentridge at The Laboratory in Johannesburg's Market Theatre.
Oakley "Tad" Hall III was an American playwright, director, and author. The co-founder and first artistic director of Lexington Conservatory Theatre, in 1978 he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a fall from a bridge; he spent decades in recovery and in the process of creating a new life. He is the subject of the 2004 documentary The Loss of Nameless Things.
Nicholas Ronald Ormerod OBE is a British theatre designer and co-founder of the international theatre company Cheek by Jowl. In 1981 he founded Cheek by Jowl with Declan Donnellan, and they are the company's co-artistic directors. In addition to his Cheek by Jowl productions, Ormerod has made theatre, opera and ballet with companies across the world. He studied law at Trinity College, Cambridge before studying for BA in theatre design at the Wimbledon School of Art.
Richard J. Zobel Jr. was an American actor. He starred as the attorney Aaron Levinsky in the original Broadway run of Nuts in 1980. Over the course of his career, he was also a singer, instrumentalist, animator, writer, and producer.
John Retallack is a British playwright and director.
The Théâtre de l'Œuvre is a Paris theatre on the Right Bank, located at 3, Cité Monthiers, entrance 55, rue de Clichy, in the 9° arrondissement. It is commonly conflated and confused with the late-nineteenth-century theater company named Théâtre de l'Œuvre, founded by actor-director-producer Aurélien Lugné-Poe, who would not take control of this performance space until 1919. His company is best known for its earlier phase of existence, before it acquired this theatre venue. From 1893 to 1899, in various Parisian theatres, Lugné-Poe premiered modernist plays by foreign dramatists, as well as new work by French Symbolists, most notoriously Alfred Jarry’s nihilistic farce Ubu Roi, which opened in 1896 at Nouveau-Théâtre.
Caesar Antichrist is a short 1895 play by the French writer Alfred Jarry. The third act is an early version of Jarry's next play, Ubu Roi; the main character of which, Père Ubu, appears here as the Antichrist. This play begins with a startling sequence of images of garbled Christianity from which Ubu emerges as the new Messiah. Scholar Kimberly Jannarone argues the play was 'not intended for the stage' and is Jarry's own form of 'the theatre of the book'. While not a closet drama, Jannarone argues this might be its closest lineage, and can be considered within a tradition of works ranging from the 'Platonic dialogues and Senecan tragedies through Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Byron’s Manfred, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axewhich'.
The Gaberbocchus Press was a London publishing house founded in 1948 by the artist couple Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. Alongside the Themersons, the other directors of the Press were the translator Barbara Wright and the artist Gwen Barnard who also illustrated a number of the company's publications.
Firmin Gémier was a French actor and director. Internationally, he is most famous for originating the role of Père Ubu in Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi. He is known as the principal architect of the popular theatre movement in France.