Another Look at Ubu Roi :: Happy Birthday, Alfred Jarry

At Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring looks at Alfred Jarry's glorious play Ubu Roi, for the occasion of Jarry's birthday (he would be 143 today).

Ubu Roi is a parody of Macbeth in which a revolutionary (that’s our Ubu!) kills the King of Poland and then does a number of other obscene things; a lot of the action is apparently outright nonsense. Ubu’s first line is “Merdre!”, the French word for shit with an extra r added. It’s hard to translate misspelled expletives; “How is one to duplicate,” asked the translator Simon Watson, “the majestic, tongue-rolling sonority of the word merdre, given only our bleak, unheroic shit to work on?”

A jarring nonsense-cuss was probably enough to get most of an 1896 audience frothing at the mouth; making matters worse, all the actors wore masks, the backdrop was plain, and the props were clearly made of cardboard. It was not long into opening night, then, that the crowd began to bray. The ratio of approving whoops to dismayed boos and hisses has been lost to the ages, but the nays must’ve had it: a riot broke out after the curtain went down.

Numerous witnesses later published accounts of the show. The most notable among them was a confused W. B. Yeats, who apparently liked the show well enough while it was happening but turned against it, beautifully if ponderously, in his autobiography:

The audience shake their fists at one another, and the Rhymer [his partner] whispers to me, “There are often duels after these performances,” and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet [i.e. a toilet]. 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 Stephane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after oour 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.”

The poet Catulle Mendès is deeply shaken in his account, too, though not entirely unpleasurably:

A new type has been put before us, created by the extravagant and brutal imagination of a man who is a sort of child. Père Ubu exists … You will not be able to get rid of him; he will haunt you and perpetually force you to remember not only that he passed this way, but that he has arrived and is here …

Only Mallarmé, who’d seen the script, had anything kind to say about it. “With the skill of a sure and sober dramatic sculptor,” he wrote to Jarry, “and with a rare and durable clay upon your fingers, you have set a prodigious figure on his feet, together with his troop.” But even this is not unreserved praise, and he seems to have gotten some variety of the willies: “He enters the repertoire of high taste and haunts me.”

Continue this sense at Paris Review Daily. And if you haven't seen or heard about the most current theatrical homage to Ubu Roi there is, check out Ubu Sings Ubu, with Tony Torn and Julie Atlas Muz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1w1Kxjz5h0