Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry

First published: 1896 (English translation, 1951)

First produced: 1896, at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, Paris

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: An imaginary Poland

Principal characters:

• Père Ubu, the former king of Aragon
• Mère Ubu, his wife
• Captain Bordure, their confederate
• King Wenceslas, the king of Poland
• Prince Bourgelas, his son

The Play

Ubu Roi (“Ubu the king”) begins as a Punch-and-Judy show, with the Ubus—Mère and Père Ubu—trading accusations, insults, and threats. Mère upbraids her husband, the former king of Aragon, who is now content to be a captain of dragoons and confidential officer to Wenceslas, king of Poland. He is at first appalled by her suggestion to overthrow the king, but when she says that as monarch he will have a new umbrella and “a great big cloak,” Ubu yields to temptation and becomes, in Mère’s view, “a real man.” Together they enlist the aid of Captain Bordure, offering him the Dukedom of Lithuania and “a magnificent meal” that includes “cauliflower à la shittr” and a lavatory brush. Summoned by the king, the cowardly Ubu immediately begins to confess the plot, putting all the blame on Bordure and Mère Ubu, only to realize that the king wishes to make him the Count of Sandomir, for which honor Ubu absurdly repays the king with a toy whistle.

Even the king’s fourteen-year-old son Bourgelas knows “what an ass that Père Ubu is”; the kindly but myopic king does not. Back at the Ubu residence, the conspirators meet to work out their plan. All reject as “beastly” Ubu’s suggestion that they poison the king but agree that splitting him open with a sword, as Bordure suggests, is quite “noble and gallant.” Standing before Mère Ubu (who substitutes for the requisite priest) the conspirators swear to fight “gallantly,” and then, in a parody of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (pr. c. 1599-1600), fall upon the deceived king, assassinating him and two of his sons, and winning the Polish army to their side. Bourgelas, having fled to the mountains, is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors, who charge him with avenging his father’s murder.

Meanwhile, as the new king, Ubu reluctantly heeds his wife’s and Bordure’s advice and distributes food and money to the people in order to win their support. He then kills three hundred nobles, appropriates their property and titles, and, after murdering five hundred magistrates, enacts new tax laws that will enable him to take the rest of the country’s wealth. He also reneges on his promise to Bordure, who is imprisoned but escapes to Russia. The Czar sees Bordure for what he is, a traitor and an opportunist, but nevertheless agrees to help him overthrow Ubu. As Poland continues to suffer under his tyranny, Ubu occupies himself, Nero-fashion, by inventing systems “to bring good weather and exorcise rain” until Mère Ubu explains how dire his situation is. Ubu “weeps and sobs” for himself but finally agrees to wage war, as his wife urges. Refusing to pay his soldiers and looking “like an armed pumpkin,” Ubu goes to war as Mère Ubu plays the part of the good bourgeois wife seeing her husband off to work: “Adieu, Père Ubu. Be sure to kill the Czar.” Then she turns to more important matters: stealing the royal treasure for herself.

At the front, Ubu, as incompetent as he is gluttonous, decides to eat rather than prepare for the Czar’s attack. Although shot by a Russian soldier, Ubu cuts his assailant to pieces. Shot at a second time, Ubu believes himself mortally wounded, but, upon learning from Bordure that the charge was only a blank, Ubu recovers and tears his former ally to pieces as well. His army routed, Ubu manages to escape to a cave with two of his Palotins, Pile and Lotice. When a huge bear attacks Lotice, Ubu climbs out of harm’s way to recite the Lord’s Prayer, while Pile struggles to save his companion. Referring to himself by the royal “we” (nous), Ubu tells his shaken and disgusted Palotins, “We did not hesitate to climb on to a higher rock so that our prayers would have less distance to travel to reach the heavens.” Still lazy and fearful, he will not even help prepare the bear for supper. That night, Pile and Lotice debate whether to stay with their king or abandon him; under cover of darkness, and with Ubu asleep, they leave.

As the fifth and final act begins, Mère Ubu enters the cave, offers a reprise of all that has befallen her, and only then realizes that her husband is there, talking to himself in his sleep. Claiming to be the archangel Gabriel, she orders Ubu to forgive his wife, but dawn breaks, and Ubu literally sees through her ruse and in Grand Guignol fashion “begins to tear her to pieces.” The fight expands when Bourgelas and his men enter the cave, followed shortly after by Ubu’s Palotins, inexplicably returned. The Ubus and their party escape, however, and are last seen aboard a ship, passing Hamlet’s Elsinore Castle, cheerfully making their way home (either to Spain or to France), with Père Ubu saying, “Ah, gentlemen! However beautiful [Germany] may be, it can never equal Poland. If there weren’t any Poland, there wouldn’t be any Poles!”

Dramatic Devices

Ubu Roi is a play in which the lavatory brush replaces the scepter, and in which the first word, merde (“shit,” childishly but deliberately misspelled merdre), declares Jarry’s intent, épater les bourgeois. The play is an assault on the audience and theater of the belle époque. Viewed against a backdrop of labor unrest, anarchist attacks on the political system, bourgeois smugness, and late nineteenth century French theater, with its emphasis on the well-made play, its star system, its commitment to theater as entertainment, and its preservation of the status quo, it becomes clear how revolutionary a work Ubu Roi actually is.

In subject and treatment, content and form, Jarry designed his play to subvert the audience’s assumptions and expectations about both theater and humankind. He conceived the play as a funhouse mirror in which the viewer would be able to see an exaggerated image of “its ignoble other self.” Not surprisingly, Jarry described the theatergoing public in Ubu-like terms as “a mass—inert, obtuse, and passive—that . . . need to be shaken up from time to time.” Jarry shakes his audience up by offering them a carnival theater of exaggeration and grotesquerie rather than either the pseudo-realistic clichés of the era’s popular plays or the naturalistic dramas that Émile Zola had been demanding. Ubu Roi innovatively suggests the stylized naïveté of Jarry’s friend, the painter Henri Rousseau, as well as the primitivism of Paul Gauguin, but mixed with a certain expressionistic brutality and childlike perversity.

Jarry’s most startling and important innovation involves his having conceived the play not simply as a funhouse mirror but as a puppet play. Dispensing entirely with the dramatic unities of time, place, and action, Jarry chose to let his title character loose, so to speak. Neither Ubu nor any of the others are “characters” in any traditional sense; they are caricatures, abstract and depersonalized, played by actors whom Jarry directed to suppress all traces of their own individuality and whom for a time Jarry wanted attached to strings (an idea as interesting as it is impracticable when dealing with actors rather than puppets).

The actors were to appear onstage either wearing masks or as if wearing masks, to speak in a distinctive monotone, and to employ the simplest and, therefore (according to Jarry), the most universal gestures. Possessing no psychological depth whatsoever, the figures appear cartoonish in word, deed, and costume. Indeed, the very logic of the play follows that of the cartoon and puppet show—a character may die in one scene yet return quite alive in the next; not surprisingly, Ubu Roi was several times staged by Jarry as a puppet play and was later turned into an animated cartoon by Geoff Dunbar (which aired on the BBC in 1978). Clearly, the frequent and sudden shifts in time and place contribute to the play’s cartoonish, anti-illusionistic effect, especially since these shifts are not indicated by any change in the set.

The play is acted out against either a plain backdrop or one painted so as to suggest simultaneously a discordancy of scenes: indoors and out, city and country (Jarry, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Paul Sérusier, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all had a hand in the painting of the original backdrop, and other prominent painters have been connected with later productions: Max Ernst in 1937; David Hockney, 1966; and Joan Miró, 1981). In keeping with the play’s essential antirealism and anti-illusionism, Jarry wanted all scenery to be kept to the barest possible minimum and whatever scenery was necessary to be treated as props. If a window is needed, for example, one will be brought onstage, used, and then removed, all in full view of the audience. As in a puppet show, changes in setting are indicated by placards posted onstage. The frequency of these changes contributes to the play’s irrealism and, given the large cast of characters and equally large number of scenes (thirty-three in five acts), its surprising continuity.

This continuity of action, which has been likened to cinematic montage, parallels Jarry’s belief in the continuity of all life, including waking and sleeping, reality and hallucination, the rational and the irrational. Jarry used these and other innovative techniques in order to shock his audience out of their accustomed modes of perceiving a world that had been made to conform to bourgeois conceptions by showing them an exaggerated version of themselves. Although some have held that the riot that occurred on opening night evidences the public’s failure to understand Ubu Roi, Jarry himself, a little perversely perhaps, believed otherwise—the public “resented it because they understood it too well.”

Critical Context

Ubu Roi is not Jarry’s only work; he also wrote poems and novels as well as other plays. It is, however, the work on which his reputation largely rests and to which he devoted much of his brief career. Its history goes back to the play Les Polanaise (the Poles), which Jarry either wrote or collaborated on in 1888 while still at the lycée. Numerous versions followed, including one in book form in July, 1896, which received favorable notices. The play itself was performed five months later, on December 9 and 10, at Aurélien-Marie Lugne-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre, and thanks to the riots which occurred (and which Jarry may have helped orchestrate), Ubu Roi became a succès de scandale. Although it was never again performed during Jarry’s lifetime, Jarry continued to revise, plunder, and publish parts, versions, and spin-offs, including two new puppet plays and a sequel, Ubu enchaîné (pb. 1900; Ubu Enchained, 1953), named after Aeschylus’s Prometheus desmōtēs (c. 450 b.c.e.; Prometheus Bound), in which Ubu seeks his same goals by adopting precisely the opposite course—becoming a slave rather than a king. The two have often been performed together; Ubu Cocu (pb. 1944; Ubu Cuckolded, 1953), the earliest of the three Ubu plays and also the most scatological and least coherent, has very rarely been performed.

Perhaps the most disconcerting result of the two December performances was the diminutive author’s own subsequent metamorphosis into his huge Ubu, thus breaking down the barrier separating author from character, life from art, and sanity from madness. Although some have interpreted this transformation as a sign of the pain Jarry felt upon seeing his play rejected, others have offered a quite different explanation. It was, they claim, Jarry’s way of “showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.” Jarry was not the only one influenced by Ubu Roi. Just as he had been influenced by the Symbolists (especially Stéphane Mallarmé), he in turn had a pronounced effect on avant-garde writers, painters, composers, and movements that were to follow: Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Fauvism, Theater of the Absurd, Guillaume Apollinaire, Eugène Ionesco, René Clair, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Prevert, Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Samuel Beckett.

Sources for Further Study

Beaumont, Keith S. Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3d ed. London: Methuen, 2001.

LaBelle, Maurice Marc. Alfred Jarry: Nihilism and the Theater of the Absurd. New York: New York University Press, 1980.

Remshardt, Rolf Erik. “King Ubu and Scenes from Macbeth.” Theatre Journal 46 (May, 1994): 262-267.

Schumacher, Claude. Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire. New York: Grove Press, 1985.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years; The Arts in France, 1885-1918: Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire. London: Faber and Faber, 1958.

Stillman, Linda Klieger. Alfred Jarry. Boston: Twayne, 1983.