Ubu Roi  

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Ubu Roi (King Ubu) is a play developed by Alfred Jarry. It was premiered on December 10 1896, and is widely acknowledged as a theatrical precursor to the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist art movements. It is the first of three plays written throughout Jarry's life that satirize European philosophies, and their sometimes ludicrous practices. The two following plays were Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded) and Ubu Enchaîné (Ubu Enchained), neither of which were performed in Jarry's lifetime.

Publishing history

The text of Ubu roi was published, first in April 25 1896 in Paul Fort's Le Livre d'art and then in June in Mercure de France.

Plot

Ubu is a nobody. He is fat, stupid, greedy, cowardly, and evil. The play grew out of school legends about the imaginary life of a hated teacher who, according to legend, had been at one point a slave on a Turkish Galley, at another frozen in the ice in Norway, and at another point the King of Poland. There are also elements from Shakespeare's Macbeth. Like Macbeth, Ubu murders the king who has helped him on the urging of his wife, usurps the throne and is in turn defeated and killed by the dead man's sons. 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 life. His plays were widely and wildly hated for their lack of respect to royalty, religion and society, their vulgarity and scatology, 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 on stage for only a short scene and its language a mash-up of high literature and slang - much of it invented).

Theatrical release

At the premiere, Jarry opened with a long speech, much to the boredom of the audience, and after the first word of the play ("merdre" - the French word for 'shit', with an extra :; some English translations use the spelling "shittr" or other variations), a riot broke loose. The performance of this play was forbidden after the first night. To avoid this problem, Jarry moved the production to a puppet theatre.

"Ubu Cocu" and "Ubu Roi"

Growing out of schoolboy legends, both "Ubu Cocu" and "Ubu Roi" have a convoluted history, going through decades of rewriting, and in the case of "Ubu Cocu", never arriving at a definitive version. (The third play was wholly written by the adult Jarry.) The legends existed before Jarry arrived at the school, and "Ubu Roi" has its origin in "Les Polonais" by the brothers Charles and Henri Morin; this is one of many plays written around the character of Père Ubu (or Hébé, as he was known at the time). Sadly, "Les Polonais" is long lost, thus, the true authorship of "Ubu Roi" can never be known. It is clear, however, that Jarry considerably expanded and rewrote the play, as well as giving the character the name under which he became famous. By the time Jarry wanted to have the play published and staged, the Morins had lost interest in these schoolboy japes, and Henri Morin gave Jarry permission to do whatever he wanted with them. Charles Morin later tried to claim credit; however, it had never really been a secret that he had had some involvement with the earliest version of the play.

Translations

King Turd, a translation Gershon Legman did with his wife.