Ubu Roi Assignment

Part I—Information on Jarry: Check this guy out!
• Born in Laval, Mayenne, France in 1873. Died in Paris at the age of 34 in 1907.

• Born to a merchant and his wife, Jarry entered the Rennes lycée (high school) in October 1888. His physics teacher was Monsieur Hebert, the model for Pere Ubu.

• Jarry was always considered brilliant but independent. He did not like taking orders.

• In 1891 he went to Paris. At his lodgings he performed early versions of Ubu for his friends.

• In 1893 he published an early version of Ubu in a magazine. In 1896 he published a book version of Ubu Roi, far more developed than the magazine version. Unusually, the play was published before it was performed. Jarry would publish different stories concerning Ubu for the rest of his life.

• Jarry himself was … let’s just say strange. He became obsessed with Ubu, referring to himself as Pere Ubu, and used “we” when he talked. In fact, he adopted an unusual way of speaking. He would carry on a conversation without inflection or nuance, equally accentuating all syllables. Try it: speak a full sentence in monotone. It’s not easy.

• He disdained convention. Fairly frequently, he walked the streets of Paris with a flour-powdered white-faced and dressed in a clown’s outfit with his hair plastered on his head. On other occasions he might wear a fur tiara, slippers, and a ragged overcoat while carrying a stick, and a gun. Then, perhaps later that day, he might wear a neat, clean conventional suit.

• He developed a cult following of people who would imitate his dress and speech pattern.

• He lost the small fortune his parents left him by staging plays.

• He lived in poverty and usually refused offers of help.

• He was an alcoholic who used ether as well.

• By all accounts, his dwelling was filthy. He had two owls in his room that he had stuffed after they died, a guitar, dirty papers, rotted flowers, and a stone phallus.

• He would spend days just sitting in his room, weakened by the effects of malnutrition, alcohol, and either,

• Just before his death, his friends found him in his room with both legs paralyzed. They took him to a hospital where died. His last words were a request for a toothpick.

• Jarry left behind about 2,000 pages of plays, poems, and essays.

Part II—Comments on Jarry’s Life

“Jarry’s life seems to have been directed by a philosophical concept. He offered himself as a victim to the derision and the absurdity of the world. His life is a sort of humorous and ironic epic which is carried to the point of the voluntary, farcical and thorough destruction of the self. Jarry’s teaching could be summarized thus: Every man is capable of showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.” (Gabriel Brunet, The Director and the Stage)

Roger Shattuck suggests that with the deth of Jarry’s mother in 1893 the only stabilitzing force in his unruly existence waa removed and he took a more or less conscious decision to retreat into a sate of permanent adolescence in both his art and his life, obliterating the discitnciton between the two and emonstrting in his excesses an absolute didain for survival, both socal and biological. (The Banquet Years: Origins of the Avant-garde)

Part III—Influences on Jarry’s Ubu Roi
1. Monsieur Hebert, his high school phyics teacher. M. Hebert was a source of humor to his students. They ridiculed his appearance: short, obese, pig-like face, small eyes, pale skin color, and a blond mustache.

Jarry described Hebert this way: “an animal, especially the porcine face, and the nose looks like the upper jaw of a crocodile, and his dress made him resemble the brother of that most aesthetically horrible marine creature, the crab.”

Hebert carried candies in his pocket (petit fours, bonbons, e.g.) and ate them during class so as to feed his “huge belly.” He was known for his incredible meanness. Jarry said he represented “everything in the world that is grotesque.”

2. Guignol (puppet show). The first plays on Hebert were puppet shows staged in a friend’s attic. Jarry wanted the actors to play the characters as giant puppets with masks, special voices for their characters, symbolic representations of crowds.

These were the puppets that Jarry used in Act 3, Scene 2 to represent the magistrates and nobles being thrown into the hole.

3. Shakespeare. Jarry was writing what he considered would be a timeless drama, like Shakespeare’s. Jarry references Shakespeare throughout the play. For example,

• Mere Ubu recalls Lady MacBeth who also encouraged her husband to commit a political assassination.

• Queen Rosamund begs Wenceslas not to attend the Grand Review, just as Calpurnia in Julius Caesar warns Caesar not to go to the Senate.

• Boggerlas is sworn to vengeance by the ghost of his father, just as Hamlet was. At the end of the play, Jarry references Elsinore, where the action in Hamlet took place.

Part IV— Theater in Europe and America in the 19th Century
Two points need to be made:

1. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the theater in the Western world was abysmal. Theater was strictly for entertainment purposes. Shakespearean plays like Othello might only be performed with drastic cuts and in-between acts a comedian, singer, or a parade of oddities might take place. Eugen Scribe who wrote over 400 plays, mostly simple farces, said the theater should be a place for “relaxation and amusement, not for instruction or correction” and audiences want “not truth but fiction.” Remember Tennessee Williams’s statement of the Reading Drama powerpoint slides I sent you: “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

2. Things began to change around 1870 when authors like Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg began to add serious content to plays and introduced the concept of realism—for now that the content of the play should mirror what goes on in people’s lives and in the world. The characters would tackle everyday problems and the authors would expose problems in their society.

Jarry disliked both kinds of theater. With Ubu Roi, he revolts against both types of theater. Jarry thought realism was limited to its own time. He wanted to write something that would be more universal, a play that spoke to the human condition and would be timely forever.

Part V—December 10, 1896: Ubu Roi, Opening Night
Jarry addressed the audience for about ten minutes before the curtain opened. He apologized for the hasty production and the lack of money the producers spent on the production. He praised the actor playing Ubu, invited the audience to see his allusions to Shakespeare and others, and discussed some dramatic theory.

Oh yeah, he was very nervous to address the audience, so he dressed up as a streetwalker to give himself courage.

Jarry wanted Ubu Roi to shock the world. He aimed to create an adventurous, daring, and challenging drama.

Note the first word in the play: “Pshite!” Sometimes translated as “Pshit” or “Shittr.” It was the first time that a vulgar word was exclaimed in the legitimate theater. Yes, the word is “shit” but with something added to almost hide the vulgarity, the way a child would when he lets something slip in front of his parents and then tacks something on to obscure the vulgarity.

“Pshite” caused an uproar. It was violently applauded and violently booed. People shouted for and against the word, pushed one another. It took fifteen minutes to restore order.
Viewers and critics declared the use of expletive as groundbreaking, celebrated it as a modern innovation, and a step in liberating language for the stage, or it was dismissed as insipid nonsense, a hoax, and a poor sophomoric joke.

Ubu Roi was performed only twice during Jarry’s life: at dress rehearsal and then opening night.

It is now a classic in modern theater.

Part VI—A Good Production on YouTube
If you want to see a good production of the play, check out the production of the Sylvia Center of the Arts.

Part VII—The Writing Assignment

Answer the following questions
(Write approximately a paragraph for each response unless otherwise stated)

1. As stated above, Jarry was opposed to the realism movement in the theater. He did not like plays like A Doll House and he would have disliked Trifles. In part, he felt realism left plays limited to its own time and would become devoid of power and meaning as human activity progresses. He wanted his characters and themes to be about the human condition, relevant in any time of history—past, present, or future.

With that in mind, how does Jarry remind his audience that the play is nonrealistic? List 7 elements in the play that point to its anti-realism. You could cite scenery, scenes, action, lines from the characters, and stage directions.

2. Jarry, as stated above, wanted his play to shock. He expressed contempt for people. He said at various times that the general public was “illiterate by definition.” Ubu, the character, is a direct attack on the public: “a mass—inert, obtuse, and passive—that need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are—and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence.”

List 10 lines, scenes or actions that reveal Ubu’s stupidity, vulgarity, or cruelty.

3. Jarry used humor to express the absurdity of life and what might be called his nihilistic vision. He uses slapstick and farce, incongruity, dark humor, obscenity, and scatological humor. Scatological humor (a specialty of males, it seems) is preoccupied with excrement, flatulence, and other bodily fluids and emissions.

Select 7 examples of what Jarry thought you might humorous. Identify the type of humor of each of your selections. You can use my terms in the question.

4. Because of the absurdity of the action and lines of the characters, some overlook the importance of this play. The quotations below may help explain the play’s importance:

“Ubu is a savage caricature of a stupid, selfish bourgeois … a terrific image of the animal nature of man, his cruelty and ruthlessness. Ubu makes himself King of Poland, kills and tortures all and sundry, and is finally chased out of the country. He is mean, vulgar, and incredibly brutal, a monster that appeared ludicrously exaggerated in 1896, but was far surpassed by reality by 1945. Once again, an intuitive image of the dark side of human nature that a poet had projected on to the stage proved prophetically true.” (Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd)

Ubu is “the bourgeois of his time and still more of ours, who coagulates in himself the cowardice, the ferocity, the cynicism, the disdain for the mind and its values, the omnipotence of the belly … the prototype of a class of tyrants and parasites.”
(Maurice Nadeau in Edward Braun’s The Director and the Stage)

Four-part question:

a. What is a caricature? You can copy and paste a good definition. Have there been leaders since the play’s premiere that Ubu might caricature?

b. What is meant by bourgeois?

c. What do you think Nadeau means by “the omnipotence of the belly”?

d. Comment on the quotations in a few sentences.

5. Jarry is often considered the forerunner of all the painters, composers, poets, playwrights, etc. who rejected traditional forms and the movement to realism.

Dada is an art movement that developed during World War I. It was a deliberately anti-art, anti-common-sense, and anti-intellectual form which was also intended to outrage and scandalize. One group of Dadaists invited 38 professors to give a lecture. What they didn’t tell the professors was that they were all going to give their lectures at the same moment in the same room—yes, simultaneously.

Look at the following two examples of Dadaism. What is similar in form or style in these painting to Ubu Roi? In other words, how are they a kind of painterly representation to what Jarry was doing onstage?

L.H.O.O.Q. by Marcel Duchamp. Find out what those initials stand for too.
https://www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/P.1969.094

Fountain by Marcl Duchamp.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573