Executive summary of the Ubu plays
Alfred Jarry’s trilogy of absurdist, scatological plays about the grotesque cartoon figure, Père or Father or Pa Ubu, scandalised theatre-goers at the time (the later 1890s) but were to be revived and lionised by the Surrealists in the 1920s and ’30s, and to become a reference point for the Theatre of the Absurd long after Jarry’s premature death in 1907 at the age of just 34
Introduction
In his introduction to the 1968 Methuen edition of the three Ubu plays, translator Simon Watson Taylor makes the point that, whereas the first two Ubu plays (Ubu Roi and Ubu Cocu) derived from the stories Alfred Jarry and his friends wrote at school, Ubu enchaîné (‘Ubu Enchained’) was the product of a more experienced 26-year-old playwright and so feels like a more detached and consciously controlled exposition of his ‘ideas’. By this time Jarry had had the experience of having two plays staged so had a much better feel for the shape and design of a stage play. In other words, there’s more structure and shape to the nonsense.
What Taylor doesn’t mention but I noticed is that the characters now have a history to live up to and this changes the vibe completely. When you’re just making characters up and inventing preposterous things to happen to them, you can do anything. But when you’ve established some characters, their appearance, their catchphrases, even their tendency to behave madly becomes predictable. Although the ostensible events of ‘Ubu Enchained’ are new, the characters’ general behaviour, mannerisms and multiple catchphrases (‘By my green candle!’) have become formulaic.
This fact is acknowledged in the very first scene of ‘Ubu Enchained’ which has Ubu giving a recap of his and Ma’s adventures in the preceding plays as if by invoking them Jarry can free himself from them. But the effect is the opposite.
Act 1
Scene 1: After the sea voyage at the end of Ubi Cocu they ended up safe and sound here in Paris. Ma Ubu says that if he’s just say the word, Pa would be appointed Minister of Phynances. But Pa Ubu points out that ‘just saying the word’ didn’t prevent…and then launches into a long recap of all their misadventures in Ubu Roi. If he won’t say the word how are they going to survive? He’ll become a slave.
Scene 2: The parade ground with three free men. These soldiers insist that the nature of freedom means they must disobey all orders, march out of step, disobey all orders. This comprises their freedom drill.
Scene 3: Pa is looking for someone to offer his services to just as the Three Free Men pass by.
Scene 4: Ubu slips in among the free men as they do their drills using a toilet brush instead of a rifle. The corporal stops them to ask who it is who is doing the drills properly, for the first time ever. Ubu tells them his experience and that he wants to be a slave. The corporal’s name is Corporal Pissweet.
Scene 5: New characters, canteen girl Eleutheria and her uncle Pissale, who got her the job in the canteen of the Free Men. Every day he takes her to work, worried that the Free Men may take advantage of her. It is (apparently) the custom in this land for the free to go naked but uncle has managed to limit this to Eleutheria’s feet. We learn that she is engaged to the Marquis of Grandmeadow.
Scene 6: Abandoning the Free Men as possible employers Ubu approaches Eleutheria and her uncle offering free foot polishing.
Scene 7: Ubu asks Ma to fetch him his special foot polishing kit. When she points out that Eleutheria isn’t wearing shoes, he says nothing will prevent him carrying out his slavish duties, although old catchphrases keep slipping from his lips (‘Killemoff, debrain!’).
Scene 8: Eleutheria and uncle pass out and, while telling himself he is performing his slavish duty, Ubu steals their wallets. This theme of FREEDOM is belaboured in a variety of ways, for example now the coins Ubu’s stealing have a female figure on one side denoting Freedom. Eleutheria comes round and they call a horse and carriage to make their getaway in.
Act 2
Scene 1: In the coach Eleutheria regains consciousness as Ubu presses his services on her. When she says she never does anything without her uncle’s consent, Ubu pulls her uncle’s corpse out of the carriage boot and Eleutheria faints again.
Ubu considers ravishing Eleutheria but decides against as Ma Ubu is riding on the box just outside and will eviscerate him if she finds him misbehaving. Instead he will take Eleutheria home and imprison her in the confines of his undying service. ‘Hooray for slavery!’
Scene 2: In Uncle Pissale’s house Pa and Ma Ubu have made themselves at home. The bell is being rung, presumably by Eleutheria, but Ubu refuses to answer till he and Ma have eaten all the scoff they can. The ringing continues so Ma Ubu says maybe his mistress needs something to drink. Very angry Ubu stomps down to the wine cellar and comes back carrying numerous bottles. Ma is surprised since she thought she drank the wine cellar dry which Ubu confirms by saying if they scrape the last dregs form each bottle maybe there’ll be a glassfull for his mistress.
Scene 3: In the bedroom of Eleutheria who’s been locked in with the corpse of her uncle. She bewails the way Pa and Ma Ubu have moved in and taken over. She is lamenting her dead uncle when he suddenly sits up, she shrieks and faints.
When she comes round Uncle Pissale says playing dead was just an extension of his method of following her round as unobtrusively as possible. She asks him to eject the ghastly Ubu from their home but uncle says, on the contrary, he is an excellent servant which is why he’s invited Ubu to attend their big party tonight to announce all the guests.
Scene 4: In the hallway Ma points out the front doorbell is ringing. Ubu asks whether she’s balanced the vase full of poo over the front door fir anyone rude enough to want to visit.
Scene 5: The front door is smashed down and, it turns out, by Corporal Pissweet. He is surprised to discover the soldier who marched with his men earlier on. Pissweet says it is an excellent opportunity to try out his theory of indiscipline and gets out a bullwhip to thrash Ubu with. Ubu is delighted because being whipped only proves what a slave he has become!
In the event Ubu is so obese and covered by his ‘strumpot’ that Pissweet exhausts himself whipping him, then demands to be announced to his mistress. In the surreal inversion of values the play keeps harping on about, Ubu insists that in this household only slaves are free enough to give orders.
When Pissweet says that Eleutheria is his mistress, he is her slave, Ubu says that only he can be a slave in that household, in which case Eleutheria is his mistress, in which case he’s going to ravish her and Ubu runs upstairs hotly pursued by Pissweet and Ma.
Scene 6: Cut to that evening’s ball in full swing. Ubu is walzing with Eleutheria. Ma Ubu runs up and tells him he’s a fat pig who’s guzzled all the food and now is dancing with the mistress of the house under his arm. Ubu ignores her and tells Eleutheria that he saved her lots of time by not letting any other guests in, and fulfilled his slavish duties by dancing with her.
Scene 7: Pissweet and the Free Men burst in. the corporal orders them not to arrest Ubu so, to show how free they are, they arrest him and drag him off to prison with Ma Ubu running along behind, determined to share in what (with the inversion of values) she calls his good luck.
Act 3
Scene 1: Pa and Ma are in prison but, with the inversion of values, consider this a great achievement. Ubu congratulates himself on how thick and solid the walls are, how the doors are barred so they’re not subject to endless irritating visitors, and how convenient it is to be served two nourishing meals a day.
Scene 2: A travesty of a trial in the Great Hall of Justice. We learn Ma and Pa’s first names (Victorine and Francis), there’s some jokey counterpointing of the prosecuting and defence counsels who are handling Ubu’s prosecution for abducting Eleutheria.
But then Pa interrupts in order to give another recap of his career (as I said the history of the character hangs heavy by now), emphasising all his crimes and ending up by saying how much he deserves the ultimate punishment of condemnation to the galleys.
And indeed the judge condemns Pa to the galleys. He will be chained by the leg and sent off to the Sultan of Turkey. Ma and Pa go ‘Hurray for slavery!’ Pissweet delivers what could be the motto of the whole play:
PISSWEET: So there really are people who can’t stand the idea of being free! [paging Professor Sartre]
Scene 3: Enter Pa and Ma dragging the iron balls they’re attached to. Pa rejoices in wearing shackles. Ma calls him an idiot so Pa starts treading on her feet.
Scene 4: Cut to two old maids in a room at the academy (the Academie Francaise?) recapping the way a fat old gentleman (Ubu) arrived in this country (France) swearing that he intends to be everyone’s servant.
Scene 5: Brother Bung arrives in this scene to bed charity for prisoners and in particular Pa Ubu, who has barricaded himself into prison where he is enjoying manicuring his nails and eating 12 meals a day.
The two maids say they certainly won’t give any charity to such a slob but Brother Bung warns them that others are coming after him who won’t be so gentle. And indeed he is followed by policemen and wreckers who smash the room to pieces, cart away all the furniture, replace it with straw and generally turn it into a prison cell. Which is the setting for:
Scene 6: In this cell Ubu mocks Pissweet who is soon to marry Eleutheria, telling him how cosy his cell is, how he loves the ball and chain on his leg. Pissweet threatens to grab Ubu by the scruff of the neck and drag him out of the prison, but Ubu says no can do, as his shackles are glued to the wall.
Scene 7: One line, the gaoler announcing ‘Closing time’.
Scene 8: Cut to the Sultan’s palace in Istanbul where the Vizier tells the Sultan that the free Country (France) is ready to send the tribute it has long promised, namely 200 convicts, among whom is the celebrated Pa Ubu and his notorious wife.
The Sultan objects that Ubu eats pig meat and pisses standing up. The Vizier counters that he’s versed in the art of navigation. Good, says the Sultan, then he’ll row all the better in the galleys!
Act 4
Scene 1: The joke or conceit about the Free Men continues. The corporal told them not to bother turning up to parade so, to prove how free they are, they now all turn up for parade exactly on time. Similarly they’ve been told not to show up for sentry duty so they now do so like clockwork. Is this just a joke or making a more serious point that what many people call ‘freedom’ is just an obstinate or perverse inversion of slavery. It’s just as formulaic, ordered and unpredictable.
Scene 2: A caricature English milord, Lord Cornholer, and his valet Jack. They’ve arrived outside the big stone building the Free Men are guarding and ask them whether the King is in. One of the Free Men suggests that truth dictates they tell the English lord that their country has no king, but the second Free Man says I will take no orders ‘even from truth itself’ and so (lyingly) assures the milord that, yes, the king is at home. He gets his valet to knock on the door
Scene 3: The gaoler opens the door for this, it turns out, is the prison Pa Ubu is in. He tells them no entry. Lord Cornholer wonders whether the king can be persuaded to come to the door and greet him. There’s a good tip for anyone who can arrange this. One of the Free Men says, tell him we don’t have a king and the people inside aren’t allowed to come out. So the other Free Man tells Lord Cornholer the exact opposite, that the king regularly comes to the door to greet visitors.
Jolly good, says the Lord, orders his valet to rustle up some corned beef and settles down to wait. We can see the way this is going…
Scene 4: Inside the prison yard the prisoners cheer for Pa Ubu and for slavery. Ubu complains to Ma that his chains are in danger of breaking or slipping off and then he will lose the fine position he’s achieved after so much effort.
Ubu reminisces about the battle in the Ukraine which features in the first play, Ubu Roi, but then the gaolers come to take him and the other assigned convicts off on their journey to the galleys of the Sultan of Turkey. Ma Ubu bids him a fond farewell.
Scene 5: Front of the prison where Lord Cornholer, his valet and the three Free Men. The gaoler elaborately undoes all the locks and the drunkest of the Free Men begins cheering the king (there is no king) because he wants to get some of the tips Lord Cornholer has been freely mentioning.
Scene 6: Pa Ubu steps through the open prison door and is bemused to be greeted with cheers of Long live the king. It reminds him eerily of being back in Poland. Lord Cornholer approaches and asks through his valet for Ubu’s autograph. Ubu tells them all to shut up and piss off and so the other characters respectfully back away.
Scene 7: While this is happening the other convicts exit the prison and surround Ubu and start chanting Long live the king! Ubu tells them to knock it off but the leader of the convicts says his name will always be linked with kingship and they are demonstrating their love of his glorious past.
Touched, Ubu hands out a set of imaginary positions in his imaginary government, matching notorious criminals to various government offices, before appointing all the other convicts ‘gallant craptains’ in his Pshittanarmy.
Act 5
Scene 1: A bunch of the other characters led by Pissweet who makes the pseudo-philosophical speech bringing out the paradox which, as we’ve seen, underlies the whole play:
PISSWEET: We are free to do what we want, even to obey. We are free to go anywhere we choose, even to prison! Slavery is the only true freedom!
He rallies his followers to break into the prisons and ‘abolish freedom’. Is this the kind of satire on abstract philosophical concepts which only a French intellectual could make?
Scene 2: Inside the prison Pissweet and his followers find Ma Ubu in her cell. The gaoler won’t let them free her. Free Men debate whether to break her cell door down. Meanwhile, the reappearance of Eleutheria who we haven’t seen for a while and appears to be in the cell next door. She complains that she’s tugging the bell-rope but no servants have come (which she was doing in her uncle’s house when we last saw her, so this has a dreamlike and comic effect).
Eleutheria reaches through her cell bars, grabs a stone jug and bashes her Uncle Pissale on the head, splitting him in two (!) The two Pissales speak in unison and reassure her that they’ll protect her, come what may.
Ma Ubu emerges but her cell door slams shut trapping her ball and chain. Eleutheria cuts the chain with a pair of nail scissors.
Scene 3: Cut to the convoy of convicts walking across a place called Slaveonia. Ubu asks the guards to tighten his shackles.
Scene 4: The gaoler from the earlier scenes runs up and tells Pa Ubu that the Masters have revolted, the Free Men have become slaves, and Ma Ubu set free. He then brings up Ma Ubu’s iron ball in a wheelbarrow to prove it. The gaoler continues to explain that the Masters have invaded the arsenals and are fitting iron balls to their legs. All the guards cheer and announce that they, too, want to become slaves. All the convicts give in to the guards’ demands to be handed the former’s balls and chains.
A noise offstage signals the arrival of the Masters who wheel cannons onstage to surround the action.
Scene 5: Pissweet commanding the Free Men demands that Ubu throws off his chains. Ubu says ‘try and catch me’ but runs off. The Free Men try to fire their artillery but discover they have no cannonballs because they’ve attached all the balls to their legs in their ‘newly-won slavery’.
Ubu reappears and throws Ma Ubu’s ball at Pissweet, scoring a direct hit. Then he massacres the other Free Men by swinging a line of chained guards at them. The Free Men run off dragging their chains pursued by the now unencumbered convicts. From time to time Ubu amuses himself by yanking on the chain and making them all fall over.
At the back of the stage appears the Grand Sultan and his retinue.
Scene 6: In the Sultan’s Palace. The Vizier tells the Sultan he’s taken delivery of not 200 slaves, as promised by the Free Country (France) but 2,000 heads, all demanding to be sent to the galleys. Pa Ubu is furious that he’s been deprived of his ball and chain and is currently smashing up the galleys from sheer obesity.
The Sultan says he has been so impressed by Ubu’s ‘noble air and majestic presence’ that he made some enquiries and came to the astonishing revelation that Ubu is the Sultan’s long-lost brother who was kidnapped by French pirates, kept in various prisons but worked himself up to become King of Aragon and then of Poland.
The Sultan tells the Vizier to treat Ubu with respect but get him on the soonest possible ship out of the country. If he gets wind of his true identity he’ll overthrow the Sultan and gobble up all Turkey’s wealth.
Scene 7: P and Ma Ubu are being herded on board a ship. Ma points out that he wasn’t much good as a slave, nobody wanted to be his master. But Pa announces he will henceforth be slave of his own ‘strumpot’, a word which has appeared in all the plays and seems to refer to his stomach.
Scene 8: Cut to a galley slave where all the characters from the play are chained to their benches as galley slaves. Pa Ubu rhapsodises to Ma about the beautiful scenery. The galley slaves sing a song. Ma Ubu says they sound funny. The gaoler explains that he’s replaced the slaves’ muzzles with kazoos.
The gaoler asks Ubu if he’d like to give any orders. Ubu says no, he is determined to remain Ubu Enchained, Ubu the slave, and goes on, in the paradoxical manner which has characterised the whole play.
PERE UBU: I’m not giving any orders ever again. That way people will obey me all the more promptly.
Ma Ubu worries that they’re heading further away from France. Pa Ubu tells her not to worry her pretty little head as they have been granted such honour that the trireme they’re travelling in has four banks of oars not three!
And on that inconsequential notes the play, and the trilogy, ends!
Thoughts
Recap of the points I made at the start. The first two plays were schoolboy nonsense blown up to theatrical proportions. This third play is far more considered insofar as it is underpinned by a thesis, a proposition about freedom and slavery, although it’s a little difficult to say what the thesis is. Is it that there is no difference between freedom or slavery? Or that slavery is the only freedom? Certainly all this playing around with the notion of freedom kept reminding me of Jean-Paul Sartre who devoted his career to explicating notions of human freedom.
Second and more interestingly, the legacy of the preceding two plays acts to force meaning, or the appearance of meaning, onto the third play. It demonstrates how difficult it is to achieve the truly random and absurd. The human mind is constructed to find meaning in everything we say or hear or do or that happens. We blame cars, toasters, uneven paving stones, the weather for accidents and misfortunes; pretty much everything we encounter, we attribute meaning or agency to. Our minds are meaning-finding machines.
And I think that’s demonstrated in this third play. Pa and Ma Ubu were virgin figures when we first encountered them but after two long plays we now have a very good sense of what to expect from them. They have acquired a meaning, a depth and weight which I don’t think their creator intended simply by dint of having been around in our imaginations so long and having carried out so many actions and said so many things.
They have settled down to become as ‘real’ as the characters in fairy tales or nonsense poems or (as the literary scholars prefer to point out) the Renaissance classic ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’. If impossible things happen in the narrative, the reader accommodates them by simply switching genre, by reading it as fantasy, dream fiction and fairy tale.
In other words, the Ubu plays demonstrate the near impossibility of writing genuinely random, absurdist narratives.
Ubu’s fatness
PISSWEET: That fat slab of galley-fodder, Pa Ubu…
PISSWEET: Fire on that big barrel of cowardice!
Ubu attracts top talent
Ubu has always attracted high calibre producers and associates. Jarry collaborated with the noted post-impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard on the ‘Illustrated Ubu Almanach’ which was published in 1899. You can search for Bonnard’s distinctive cartoon illustrations from this page.
A note tells us that Ubu enchaîné wasn’t performed until 1937, when the sets were designed by Max Ernst. Wow. Ernst had already created sketches and paintings of Ubu, whose absurd character suited the artist’s bizarre vision.
Ubu Imperator by Max Ernst (1923) Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France
Exactly 30 years later, in 1967, the translation I read, by Simon Watson Taylor, was staged in Edinburgh, with Miriam Margolyes as Ma Ubu, with set design by Gerald Scarfe, and music provided by The Soft Machine. Wow again.
The Polish avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote a 2-hour opera based on Ubu Roi and titled ‘Ubu Rex’, which was premiered by the Bavarian State Opera on 6 July 1991, a valiant attempt to capture the play’s absurdity in music.
And rock music fans should have heard of the splendid American industrial band, Pere Ubu, formed in 1975 and highly influential in the later ’70s and ’80s. They combine fairly standard, if inventive, rock grooves with the witch-doctor madness of front man David Thomas. Remember how the first words of the first Ubu play, Ubu Roi – in effect its declaration of intent – are ‘Merdra, merdra’ – well, they’re refrain of maybe Pere Ubu’s best song.
Thus in hundreds of ways, obvious and more arcane, the influence of Jarry’s comic creation has echoed through the arts over the century since his birth.
Credit
I read ‘Ubu Enchained’ in the 1965 translation by Cyril Connolly, included in ‘The Ubu Plays’, first published by Methuen World Classics in 1968 and republished in a new paperback edition in 1993.
Related links
- Alfred Jarry Wikipedia article
- The Ubu plays in French
- Illustrated English version of Ubu with hand-written text
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