Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions) Summary and Reviews

Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Alfred Jarry

Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Alfred Jarry
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-01-13
ISBN: 0486426874
Number of pages: 80
Publisher: Dover Publications

Book Reviews of Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions)

Book Review: A CLASSIC, BUT NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH OR PRUDISH
Summary: 4 Stars

I've been rereading some of the classics of absurdist theater -Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, and this play, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Ubu the King. Reading Ubu again is like reading it new, so fresh and vivid its language and imagery is, so original a play it is, even now, 115 years after its first performance in Paris. A performance run that lasted two days, by the way -one night of dress rehearsal in front of an audience and one of full performance. The audiences at both performances were by all accounts unruly, and it's easy to see why when you read the play. Even by modern standards, it is unbelievably rude and deliberately offensive. But it is also extremely funny and, looking ahead to Dada and Artaud's Theatre of the Violent, definitely influential.

If there is a parallel to Jarry's scabrous play, it might be some of the musical works of Erik Satie, a contemporary of Jarry, who turned away from romantic ideals of composition to create musical fragments with whimsical titles -"Four Movements in the Shape of a Pear," "Sketches and Flirtations of an Overweight Bonhomme," "Flabby Preludes for a Dog." Both Jarry and Satie were early surrealists, but Jarry took the cake on offensiveness.

Oddly enough, that's one of the great pleasures of this play -its offensiveness, its deliberate and sustained air of vulgarity. Ubu is no play for the faint of heart. The playgoer who tolerate profanity because it is appropriate to the situation will find no excuse for profanity her, because Jarry uses it simply to epater le bourgeois (shock/cock a snook at the middle class). Thus, the repeated use of hardcore profanities that spot the pages of Ubu.

The center of the play is Ubu and the play tells of his run for the kingship of Poland. Why Poland? Because Poland didn't exist in Jarry's time. It hadn't for over a hundred years, ever since the respectable rulers of Europe had sliced and diced it into nonexistence in three successive partitions in the eighteenth century. Poland was Nowhere Land and thus fertile ground for Jarry's phantasmagoric imagination. And Ubu himself? He's vulgar -that's taken for granted--but also greedy, vain, cowardly, profane, no scabrous!, and treacherous. Let's see, have I left anything out? Oh, yes! He's also very very funny.

It took more than a generation before Ubu Roi gained champions. In the 1920s, the Dadaists and the Surrealists adopted it. In the 50s, it was resurrected again for presentation by Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's influential avant garde Living Theater. We saw Beck/Malina's theater in performance in the late sixties. The climax of the performance was an invitation to come on stage, where we were encouraged to take off our clothes and, if not that, pile onto a huge lump of other spectators so the cowards who had stayed in their seats in the theater could look at us. It was interesting how your perspective changed when you went on stage to play, not a character, but yourself, and yourself on display.

Ultimately, that's what theater like this was about: playing with language, meaning and values, and, behind that, exposing us to ourselves, in all our vulnerabilities and behind all our camouflages.

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