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
Starting as a fairly sensible Symbolist writer when the movement was at its peak in the early 1890s, Jarry announced his own bizarre take on the movement in the 1895 play ‘Caesar Antichrist’ before departing the movement altogether, in 1896, with the work that made him immortal, Ubu Roi.
Since ‘roi’ is the French word for ‘king’ the title easily translates as ‘King Ubu’ but a lot of the rest of the play doesn’t translate easily at all. Its language is a unique mix of slang code-words, puns and near-gutter vocabulary, set to strange speech patterns. The tone is established in the very first words of the play – ‘Merdra merdra’ – which aren’t French words at all. They’re distortions of the French word ‘merdre‘ which means ‘shit’.
With its scatological language, its studied disrespect for all conventional language, and its wild absurdist plot studded with atrocities and mass murders, you can see why the first night of Ubu Roi resulted in uproar, the audience (allegedly) coming to blows between supporters and outraged opponents.
Schoolboy origins and puppet performances
Eventually the Ubu oeuvre would end up as three plays and a version with music and songs but it began as schoolboy jokes. In 1888 the 15-year-old Alfred Jarry arrived at the lycée in Rennes and became friends with another boy, Henri Morin. He discovered Henri was part of a group which took the mickey out of the heir well-meaning, but obese and incompetent physics teacher Physics teacher, Monsieur Hébert, known variously as P.H., Pére Heb, Ebé and other nicknames. Henri and his older brother had gone to the trouble of writing a short satire, ‘The Poles’, in which the cartoon figure of le Pere Ebé became King of Poland only to suffer various misfortunes and indignities.
Jarry threw himself into this fictional world and adapted it as a play for marionettes which was performed first at the Morin house then in the Jarry household. Jarry developed some of the themes and characters into a play entirely of his own, Onésime ou les Tribulations de Priou featuring ‘le PH’.
In 1891 the 18-year-old Jarry left Rennes and moved to Paris to attend the Lycée Henri IV to prepare for admission to the École Normale Supérieure. Here he carried on developing the material, rewriting the Morin brothers’ Polish play and his own Onésime, which became Ubu Roi and Ubu Cocu, respectively. These plays he performed with schoolfriends at his Paris lodgings and it was now that the chief protagonist’s name settled as ‘le Père Ubu’. But by now Jarry had his eye set on a literary career.
In 1893 young Jarry managed to get fragments of the plays published in a literary journal. Jarry was becoming known for his poems and short prose pieces. In October 1894 some of these were published in his first book, the ultra-symbolist Minutes de Sable Mémorial. At the end of the year Jarry was briefly called up for military service but his short stature caused ridicule and he was discharged for medical reasons. A year after Minutes his second book was published, César-Antéchrist (1895).
In January 1896 Jarry was introduced to the theatre director Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe. In June Lugné-Poe invited Jarry to become a writer-secretary at his theatre and in the same month the text of Ubu Roi was published. Then Ubu Roi had its first stage performance on 10 December 1896, to the accompaniment of shouting, screaming, cheers and jeers and fighting among the audience.
The controversy was picked up in the papers and journals and Jarry became a celebrity overnight. His friends took to jokingly calling him Père Ubu and he copied the manner and ambling walk of his character for their amusement.
As we’ve seen the plays always had a puppet version or equivalent right from their inception as a schoolboy prank. Jarry had it performed as a marionette play at his friend’s and his own house. What’s surprising that this puppet version lived on into the ‘adult’ world. In 1898 a performance by marionettes was given of Ubu Roi at a small theatre owned by none other than the artist Pierre Bonnard.
At this time Jarry finished a new version of Ubu Cocu but failed to find a publisher for it. In fact neither version of Ubu Cocu was published or performed during his lifetime. It was only half a century later, in 1944, that the second version was published. The English essayist and editor Cyril Connolly was the first to publish an English version, in his magazine Horizon in 1945 and went on to become a great promoter of Jarry’s work.
During 1899 Jarry worked on the third play, Ubu Enchaíné (‘Ubu in Chains’). Although published in 1900 this, also, wasn’t to be performed for a long time, not until 1937.
In 1899 and 1901 Jarry published the ‘Illustrated Almanac of Père Ubu’, illustrated by his friend Pierre Bonnard. He also devoted time to rewriting Ubu Roi as a two-act musical with songs. This version mutated sufficiently to be considered the fourth in the series, Ubu sur la Butte. Once again the puppet theme surface because this version was first performed by the marionettes of the Théâtre Guignol des Gueules de Bois in November 1901, although it wasn’t published until 1906, the year before his death.
As the summary shows, after the first scandal of the Roi premier wore off Jarry struggled to get his works either published or performed. He wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder, because he did have novels, stories and a three-volume fictionalised autobiography published, and he was working all the time as a poet, journalist and literary and art critic. he was a busy bee. He also became a fixture of avant-garde circles, acting as a kind of court jester becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol to fuel his performances.
His other famous achievement was developing the nonsense science of pataphysics, which he defined as the ‘science of imaginary solutions’ which ‘will examine the laws governing exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one’. References to this anti-science cropped up in various works and was given full bizarre expression in Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. But this, also, didn’t see the light of day till after his death, not being published till 1911.
King Ubu
Any prose summary can’t convey how absurd, nonsensical and caricature-like the characters and action are. The best short summary is to think of it as a kind of puppet parody of Macbeth, in which a lazy army officer is encouraged by his scheming wife to assassinate the King of Poland, usurp the throne, and then behave with appalling and wanton cruelty, butchering entire classes before declaring war on Russia.
Act 1
Scene 1: Ubu says he’s content with his position of captain of the dragoons and aide de camp to King Wenceslas while his wife (Ma Ubu) encourages him to assassinate the king and all his heirs and make himself king, plonk his bum on the throne and scoff as many bangers as he wants.
Scene 2: Dining room laid out for a feast. Ma Ubu tells him to wait till the guests arrive but greedy Ubu can’t stop himself tucking into the chicken then the veal.
Scene 3: Captain MacNure and his men arrive for the feast which, Ma Ubu explains, includes ‘Jerusalem fartichokes and cauliflower à la pschitt’. There’s not actually much to eat so Ubu exits and returns holding a toilet brush which he flings at the soldiers. Some of them taste it and collapse from poisoning (or poosening). He then forces all the soldiers out by throwing bison ribs at them.
Scene 4: After the scatological pleasantries:
PA UBU: Well, captain, how did you enjoy your dinner?
CAPTAIN MACNURE: Very much, sir, except for the pschitt.
PA UBU: Oh I didn’t think the pschitt was too bad.
Ubu asks the captain to join his conspiracy to overthrow the king. The captain enthusiastically signs up, revealing he is a mortal enemy of the king. Ubu promises to make him Duke of Lithuania.
Scene 5: A messenger arrives from the king requesting Ubu’s presence and he and Ma panic, thinking their conspiracy has been discovered. ‘Oh pschitt!’
Scene 6: Ubu at court, the king surrounded by his three sons and courtiers, in fact doesn’t suspect a thing, in fact he’s called him in to appoint him Count of Sandomir. Overwhelmed with gratitude (and relief) Ubu gives the king a fine decorated kazoo! The king gives it to his son Boggerlas and invites Ubu to the Grand Review tomorrow. As he turns to go Ubu trips and falls and the king helps him up. Won’t stop him from being ‘liquidated’ Ubu mutters.
Scene 7: A meeting of the conspirators discussing how to kill the king. Ubu suggests they lace his food with arsenic. Captain McNure suggests he cleaves the king from head to toe with his sword. Ubu is momentarily tempted to turn the conspirators in and claim a reward but they all boo so he suggests another plan. He’ll tread on the king’s foot, yell PSCHITT and that will be the signal for the conspirators to attack. Ubu makes them swear an oath.
Act 2
Scene 1: The day of the Grand Review. His queen and eldest son Boggerlas warn him against Ubu but the king insists he’s his most loyal servant. The queen describes a dream she had of the king being killed and thrown into the River Vistula. Irritated, the king says he will attend to the Grand Review without sword or breastplate to prove them wrong and sweeps out with his other sons. The queen and Boggerlas go to the chapel to pray.
Scene 2: The Grand Review. After a few preliminary comments Ubu treads on the king’s foot, shouts pschitt, and the conspirators attack him. Ubu grabs the crown and the king’s two sons flee.
Scene 3: From a balcony the queen and Boggerlas watch all the soldiers chasing the two sons and striking them dead.
Scene 4: The conspirators break into the chapel and confront the queen and Boggerlas. The latter defies them and kills quite a few of them. In face of this Ubu is a terrified coward but inches towards Boggerlas who takes a sword slash at him then escapes with the queen through a hidden passage.
Scene 5: A cave in the mountains where Boggerlas and the queen have retreated. She laments the death of her husband and sons and then collapses dead from grief. Then appear ghosts of the king, his brothers, and the founder of their dynasty (Lord Matthias of Königsberg) who tells Boggerlas to be brave and hands him an immense sword. It’s only during this scene that we’re told that Boggerlas is only 14 years old.
Scene 6: Ubu is now crowned in the king’s stateroom. He is arguing with Ma and the captain. They’re saying he must distribute largesse to the masses or they’ll overthrow him in his turn. He vehemently refuses till the captain explains that with no money the masses won’t pay their taxes. At which point Ubu orders the distribution of millions of gold pieces and the roasting of 50 oxen to feed the mob.
Scene 7: From his balcony King Ubu throws gold to the cheering mob. Captain Macnure suggests organising a race, which they promptly do, the winder winning a chest of gold pieces, the mob cheering and racing and falling over each other in their glee. Bread and circuses.
Act 3
Scene 1: In the palace Ma Ubu reminds Pa Ubu he promised to ennoble the captain. Ubu replies the captain can whistle for his dukedom and Boggerlas can go jump in a lake. Ma Ubu says he’s making a big mistake underestimating his enemies, so Ubu threatens to chop her into little pieces and chases her offstage.
Scene 2: Ubu calls together all the nobles of the land into the Great Hall of the palace and announces that he is going to liquidate them all and confiscate all their wealth. One by one they come forward, identify themselves and Ubu pushes them with a boathook through a trapdoor down into the bleed-pig chambers from where they’ll be led to the cash-room and debrained.
Ubu interrogates four or so, pushing each into the trapdoor, before having his own numerous titles proclaimed. Ma Ubu warns him he is being too brutal. Next he proposes to stop paying the judges and, when they protest, has them all pushed through the hole too, telling Ma Ubu that he will administer justice. Then he proposes a new range of taxes. When the financiers protest he has them all thrown down the hole.
MA UBU: Come, come, Lord Ubu, kings aren’t supposed to behave like that. You’re butchering the whole world.
PA UBU: So pschitt!
Scene 3: In a peasant’s house the peasants exchange the news that the old king’s been murdered, Pa Ubu is king. One of them has just come from Cracow where he saw the bodies of 300 nobles and 500 magistrates that Ubu had killed. At that moment there’s a great banging on the door and Ubu announces he’s come to collect their taxes.
Scene 4: Ubu enters the peasant’s house with ‘an army of moneygrubbers’ then orders his Lords of Phynance (a word which recurs throughout the Ubu oeuvre) to wheel in the phynancial wheelbarrow.
PA UBU: I’ve had it announced in the official gazette that all the present taxes have to be paid twice over, and all those I may think up later on will have to be paid three times over. With this system I’ll soon make a fortune, then I’ll kill everyone in the world and go away.
Goaded beyond endurance the peasants rebel but Ubu has his men massacre them all and burn the village to the ground.
Scene 5: Ubu visits Macnure who he’s had thrown in prison (specifically, ‘the casemate of Thorn’) for raising a rebellion against him. Macnure tells him that in just five days Ubu has more crimes than would damn all the saints in paradise but Ubu mocks him and warns him that the rats at night are very hungry.
Scene 6: Cut to the palace of the Tsar in Moscow. Somehow Macnure escaped the casemate of Thorn and has ridden for five days and five nights to beg the Tsar to come to the aid of the people of Poland. He offers his sword and a map of the city of Thorn. The Tsar accepts him into his service.
Scene 7: Ubu announces to his council that his plans to get rich are working. In every direction are vistas of burning villages and people suffering under his extortions. Now he is going to share a plan he’s conceived to keep rain at bay and bring good weather. Ma Ubu mutters that he’s gone mad and Ubu threatens her.
A messenger enters with a message from Macnure which announces that he is in the service of the Tsar and is going to invade Ubu’s land alongside Boggerlas. Ubu is thrown into a cowardly panic but Ma Ubu counsels war and all his advisers start chanting war war war.
Scene 8: The army camp outside Warsaw. Ubu’s soldiers cheer for him. He puts on a set of complicated armour pieces until he looks like an armour-plated pumpkin. He’s far too fat to get on a small horse and when they lead in a giant horse he keeps falling off. Ubu makes a series of bragging boasts then clatters off. Ma Ubu says that now that overstuffed dummy is out of the way she can kill Boggerlas and get her hands on the treasure herself.
Act 4
Scene 1: Ma Ubu is in the crypt of the kings of Poland in Warsaw cathedral searching for buried treasure. She eventually opens a tomb to find old bones and gold all mixed together and begins extracting it when ghostly sounds and then a voice from the dead terrifies her into running offstage.
Scene 2: In the main square in Warsaw Boggerlas has rallied the surviving nobles and the people to overthrow Ubu. Ma Ubu emerges with her guards and there’s a massive fight. During this her ‘Palcontent’, Gyron (who Jarry specified should be played by a Black man) at first wreaks havoc in the crowd and then is brought down. As the crowd makes to grab Ma Ubu she escapes.
Scene 3: Ubu at the head of his army which has been marching through the Ukraine seeking the Russian army. Ubu is so ludicrously over-armoured that even the big horse couldn’t carry him so he’s been walking and leading it by the reins. A messenger arrives to tell him that, in his absence, there’s been a rebellion in Warsaw, Gyron is killed and Ma Ubu fled to the mountains.
Now his army sights the Russians. Ubu issues fairly reasonable instructions for the order of battle based on the notion that the Polish army will remain on the hilltop and wait for the Russians to come up towards them at which point they’ll cut them down with their artillery. But, nonsensically, as it’s 11 o’clock, instructs the army to have lunch, saying the Russians won’t attack. At that moment a cannon ball goes whizzing by, crashing into the nearby windmill.
Scene 4: Confused melee of the battle in which Ubu is shot, thinks he’s dead but gets up again, while Captain Macnure enters cutting a swathe through the Polish troops till he comes face to face with Ubu. Ubu again shows his cowardice by thinking he’s been hit by another cannonball but Macnure laughs that it was just a cap pistol. Infuriated, Ubu tears him to pieces!
Encouraged by his lead general, General Laski, Ubu throws himself on the Tsar and they have a fierce hand-to-hand fight which the Tsar wins and proceeds to chase Ubu across the battlefield. There’s a trench and Ubu jumps over it while the Tsar falls in.
TSAR: Now I’m in the soup!
Ubu describes the scene of the Tsar getting massacred by Ubu’s soldiers and does it in an elaborately formal and periphrastic style quite unlike anything, deployed for comic or incongruous effect. He then admires his own eloquence. Despite this the Russian soldiers rescue their Tsar and pursue Ubu and his army off-stage.
Scene 5: Finds Ubu holed up in a cave in the mountains with a category of companions called ‘the palcontents’ and humorously named Head and Tails. They mock the way Ubu cowardly fled the battlefield while Ubu describes himself as the hero of the battle, struggling manfully against overwhelming odds.
Scene 6: A bear comes into the cave and attacks Tails while Heads attacks the bear. Ubu, obviously, climbs up a rock out of the way but says he is high-mindedly (and absurdly) offering a prayer to him. Heads and Tails finally overcome and kill the bear as Ubu comes down from his rock delivering another long pompous speech about how he saved the day with his prayers. He sends Tails off to fetch wood and orders Heads to carve up the bear, making sure he himself remains safely distant.
Throughout all this Heads and Tails have been muttering comments about Ubu’s cowardice and now, when he demands a share of the cooked meat, they come out into the open and call him a fat pig, saying he won’t get anything to eat unless he shares in the work.
Deprived of food Ubu beds down and goes to sleep. The other two wonder whether the rumours are true that Ma Ubu was overthrown, and decide to slip off and head for home while Ubu’s asleep.
Scene 7: Ubu talks in his sleep delivering a stream-of-consciousness monologue which includes elements of everything which has happened in the play up to and including the bear fight.
Act 5
Scene 1: It’s night time in the same cave and Ma Ubu enters, not noticing her husband asleep in the corner. She delivers a long monologue recapping her adventures since Ubu left Warsaw, namely: rummaging about in the kings’ crypt; exiting to discover Boggerlas leading rebels in the main square; the resulting fight in which her lover, the Black Gyron was cut down; how she made it to the River Vistula but all the bridges were guarded so she swam across; how she barely escaped the baying mob; how she has trudged through the snow for four days and arrived, starving, at this cave.
With allowance for some of the delivery, this isn’t absurd at all but is the language of the contemporary adventure novel.
At which point Ubu stirs and starts mumbling half awake, obviously starting Ma Ubu who quickly realises who it is, and then decides to take advantage of the situation, puts on a booming voice and pretends to be the archangel Gabriel! She then embarks on the comic enterprise of having the angel Gabriel tell Ubu what a beautiful, charming woman his wife is, an ‘absolute saint’, while Ubu, predictably and to comic effect, rebuts her at every point, describing her as a sexless old hag.
Ma Ubu goes on to tell Ubu he must forgive her for stealing a little bit of his money, but this backfires as it only confirms what Ubu suspected. Moreover dawn is coming up and it’ll soon be light enough in the cave for him to see and recognise her.
And that’s what happens. Ma Ubu tries to brazen it out but Ubu realises it’s her. He asks what happened back in Warsaw and she tells him about the rebellion and how she had to run away from the Poles. Ubu counters that he had to run away from the Russians, just goes to prove what they say, that ‘great minds think alike’.
MA UBU: They can say that if they want, but my great mind thinks it’s just met a pea-brained idiot.
Enraged Ubu throws the bear’s body over her which a) makes Ma Ubu scream that she’s being attacked, and the way her movements seem to be animating the bear b) makes Ubu scream that the bear’s come back to life.
When they both realise they’re wrong she launches a tirade of abuse at him which makes him jump over, force her to her knees, list the tortures he’s about to subject her to, and then start to tear her in pieces when…there’s a loud noise at the entrance to the cave.
Scene 2: Enter Polish soldiers led by Boggerlas who orders them to surrender. Instead Ma and Pa Ubu reply with volleys of abuse and start attacking him, the Polish soldiers attack them and it’s another general melee.
At which point there’s a cry of ‘Long live Pa Ubu’ and Heads, Tails and other Ubuists run into the cave, turning it into a real free-for-all. The Ubuists get the better of it, wounding Boggerlas. Two Poles are guarding the entrance to the cave but Ubu knocks them down with the bear corpse and they escape outside.
Scene 3: Just four lines long as Ma and Pa Ubu struggle across the snow-covered landscape, concluding that Boggerlas has given up chasing them and gone back to Warsaw to be crowned.
Scene 4: Suddenly we are aboard a ship in the Baltic. Pa Ubu makes a nonsensical little speech about the ‘knots’ a ship’s speed is measured in. The sea kicks up and the ship begins leaning. the captain issues sensible orders but Ubu insists on taking over himself and issues a stream of nonsensical, garbled orders to the sailors. In fact his orders are so nonsensical that some of the sailors literally die of laughter.
Several great waves break over the ship as Ubu continues his nonsense. In the last few lines Ma and Pa, Heads and tails all illogically say how they’re looking forward to returning to their native France, Spain, Paris, Germany, only for Pa to conclude.
PA UBU: Beautiful though [Germany] may be, it’s not a patch on Poland. Ah gentlemen, there’ll always be a Poland. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any Poles!
And with this inconsequential thought, the play ends.
Literary references
To augment the mock heroic vibe and absurdity the play contains a surprising number of references to ‘serious’ works of literature. The respected general overthrowing his own king and ruling like a tyrant comes from Macbeth. The various armies traipsing back and forth are reminiscent of Hamlet, a reference which is made explicit when, in the last scene, the ship rounds the Cape of Elsinore (where Hamlet is set). The involvement of a bear could be referencing the famous bear in The Winter’s Tale.
And behind all these smaller references looms the title, which echoes the primary tragedy in all European literature, Sophocles’ play ‘Oedipus Rex’ which translates into French as ‘Œdipe Roi’. This conforms to the very common view, at the end of the nineteenth century and which also informed the first modernists, that the present day is a pathetic echo of the greatness of the past, as Ezra Pound put it, a beer bottle on a pediment.
Thoughts
Well, it’s quite funny in parts and I enjoyed the schoolboy humour but:
1. ‘Ubu Roi’ shows how difficult it is to sustain absurdity. What struck me is how unabsurd most of it is. I mean there’s lots of swearing and made-up words and Ubu is made to sound like a megalomaniacal imbecile and the scenes with the bear and Ma pretending to be the angel Gabriel are farcical enough – but the basic narrative of 1) a coup, 2) the usurper leading an army against the neighbouring country, 3) a counter-coup in the capital city in his absence… Far from being absurd this sounds like the history of too many countries during the twentieth century and of too many post-colonial nations since independence. In other words, many passages of it felt all too realistic.
2. Unfortunately, Jarry’s vision of pointless barbarism was very much overtaken by the events of the twentieth century. Assassinations and coups and the coming to power of brutal tyrants who massacre their own subjects were dwarfed by the horrific regimes of Hitler and Stalin in the mid-century. But as I read the descriptions of Ubu combining real ignorance with terrifying brutality, I couldn’t help thinking of many of the African dictators I was reading about last year, specifically the terrifyingly stupid, cunning and sadistic Idi Amin.
- The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden (1998)
- Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018)
Compared to the real world the Ubu plays come over as what they began as, schoolboy pranks.
Ukraine
Eerie that at the centre of the play is war in Ukraine, then, as now, contested borderlands. Ukraine was destined to be the scene of unbearable suffering in the first half of the twentieth century, long before its present tragedy unfolded.
Influences
I list a few of the artists, musicians and composers who’ve engaged with the Ubu texts in my review of the third play. But here I should mention the splendid American industrial band, Pere Ubu, formed in 1975 and highly influential in the later ’70s and ’80s. They combined fairly standard, if colourful rock grooves with the witch-doctor madness of front man David Thomas. Remember that the first words of Ubu Roi are ‘Merdra, merdra’? Well, they’re refrain of what is maybe Pere Ubu’s best song, Modern Dance (1978).
Credit
I read ‘Ubu Roi’ in the 1968 translation by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor, included in ‘The Ubu Plays’, first published by Methuen World Classics in 1968, republished in a new edition in 1993.
Related links
- Alfred Jarry Wikipedia article
- The Ubu plays in French
- Illustrated English version of Ubu with hand-written text
Books & Boots 