Ubu Roi

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Ubu Roi

• Alfred Jarry

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Alfred Jarry

• 1873 - 1907

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Plot Summary

• Pa Ubu rises to power when he is egged on by his
  wife to assassinate Wenceslas, the King of
  Poland, and to take his crown.
• He then grows insanely tyrannical and despotic -
  killing nobles and taking their lands, giving out
  money so that people will pay their taxes and not
  revolt against him, then demanding that taxes
  should be paid twice over, leaving the people
  with no money.
• In his rise to power, however, he failed to kill
  Boggerlas, one of King Wenceslas' sons, who
  fights against him to regain the crown.
• He is aided by Captain Macnure, who betrays Pa
  Ubu, and enlists the Russians to help restore the
  crown to Boggerlas. The play ends with Pa and Ma
  Ubu fleeing back to France, their homeland.

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Aim of Ubu Roi

• to escape the
• rational confines
• of bourgeois
• culture

Pa Ubu
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Initial Reactions Ambivalence

• first staged in Paris,1896
• riot ensued
• violently booed and applauded
• compared with the work of Shakespeare
• dismissed as a poor joke
• called an inspiration to modern youth

Ma Ubu
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Why Audience Rioted

• vulgarity, cruelty, and obscenity
• theatrical equivalent of an anarchist bomb
  attack and as an act of political subversion
• in no way constituted a serious piece of
  literature or of theater but rather a gigantic
  hoax

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Parody The Means of Attacking the Powers that
Be

• the classics
• theatrical conventions
• the middle class and their customs
• religious, political, and social institutions

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The Theater of that Time

• entertainment that catered to a bourgeois public,
  anything but a place for experimentation
• dominant model was the well-made play, a
  tradition of technique over content
• growing trend toward realism in the theatre
• realistic theater was supposed to make the
  audience 'believe' in ways that they had never
  been asked to before

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Ubu No Holds Barred

• embodies stupidity, brutality, and ferociousness
• conceived as hideous, grotesque, with a
  pear-shaped head, practically no hair and an
  enormous, flabby stomach
• symbolizes everything that was pushy and piggy
  about the bourgeoisie
• represents the uncontrolled unconscious forces

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Jarrys Theater--Characteristics

• fascinated with the possibilities of theatrical
  space (the theatrical "spectacle")
• relatively uninterested in dialogue, story-lines
  and character development.
• draws upon puppet shows and plays performed by
  marionettes
• attempts to create a flat or two-dimensional
  theater ("an ABSTRACT theater") by using placards
  to announce the time and location of the dramatic
  action and to take the place of scenery and
  on-stage crowds

Ma and Pa Ubu
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Origins of the Play High School Prank

• was initially a simple schoolboy satire written
  when Jarry attended the Lycée de Rennes
• made fun of Jarrys physics professor, who was
  "an enormously fat, ridiculous and ineffectual
  figure"
• embodied everything that Jarry was growing to
  hate?the world's first truly unredeemable
  character
• burlesques Shakespeares Macbeth, Julius Caesar,
  and Richard III to tell the story of Ma and Pa
  Ubu's rise to power

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Theatrical InnovationsBreaking with Tradition

• staccato manner of speaking
• the misplaced accents
• the puppet-like movement
• the use of masks
• the use of placards
• the hodge-podge style of scenic painting

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Use of the Mask

• to reinforce the impression that the actors on
  stage were actually "man-sized marionettes
• to frustrate the ambition of the actors to be
  stars
• to frustrate the desire of the audience to escape
  from its own situation and identify with its own
  particular vice