Ubu Roi Book

Ubu Roi (or, Ubu the King) by Alfred Jarry opened and closed on December 10, 1896 in Paris. The audience stood and threw anything they could get their hands on at the stage, and howled in outrage at the actors. The play, comic grotesque, sort of inspired by a boyhood send-up of their obese, unattractive teacher, features an obese, unattractive guy who does anything he can (including mass murder) to become king and enrich himself. In the tradition of Rabelais, it skewers the greedy and pompous and corrupt in power.

Beginning with the word "merdre" (or shit, with an added "r") shouted by the main character (at his wife'lots of mutual loathing between them), it is profane and juvenile and funny and outrageous and contains a suprising number of many references to Shakespeare. W. B.Yeats was in attendance at the performance; while he didn't throw anything at the stage, he also didn't like it, acknowledging it was a comedy, but was sad that the play did not advance his own symbolist agenda.

I read it because I am always looking for appropriate explorations of kingly or presidential power to help me understand our current situation. This helps. It was embraced by the surrealists and absurdists. It reminds me a bit of Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Or Antonin Artaud's theatre as plague
or theater of cruelty. I had also just read Oedipus the King and Antigone where we see abuses of power as tragic. Let's call Ubu comic grotesque rather than tragedy. Maybe it's a bit of a parody of King Lear or Macbeth, both abuse-of-power plays.

Not that I am saying Ubu Roi made me think of Donald Trump, but let's just say I would not be surprised to see a production featuring a fat king with orange hair. A Toronto theater troupe did a version parodying former mayor Rob Ford. I am sure there have been similar productions everywhere.

On a related note, when Trump was elected, comics artists Warren Craigshead committed to drawing and posting a (grotesque) cartoon of him every day as long as he were in office, inspired by some daily moment of outrage, linked to some news article. You can follow him on Instagram, it's called TRUMPTRUMP:



Jarry on his purpose in Ubu Roi:

"I intended that when the curtain went up the scene should confront the public like the exaggerating mirror in the stories of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, in which the depraved saw themselves with dragons' bodies, or bulls' horns, or whatever corresponded to their particular vice. It is not surprising that the public should have been aghast at the sight of its other self, which it had never before been shown completely. This ignoble other-self, as Monsieur Catulle Mendes has excellently said, is composed 'of eternal human imbecility, eternal lust, eternal gluttony, the vileness of instinct magnified into tyranny; of the sense of decency, the virtues, the patriotism & the ideals peculiar to those who have just eaten their fill.' Really, these are hardly the constituents for an amusing play, & the masks demonstrate that the comedy must at the most be the macabre comedy of an English clown, or of a Dance of Death."