Transcript Ubu Roi

Ubu Roi
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry
1873 - 1907
Plot Summary
• Pa Ubu rises to power when he is egged on by his wife to
assassinate Wenceslas, the King of Poland, and to take his
crown.
• He then grows insanely tyrannical and despotic - killing nobles
and taking their lands, giving out money so that people will
pay their taxes and not revolt against him, then demanding that
taxes should be paid twice over, leaving the people with no
money.
• In his rise to power, however, he failed to kill Boggerlas, one
of King Wenceslas' sons, who fights against him to regain the
crown.
• He is aided by Captain Macnure, who betrays Pa Ubu, and
enlists the Russians to help restore the crown to Boggerlas.
The play ends with Pa and Ma Ubu fleeing back to France,
their homeland.
Aim of Ubu Roi
• to escape the
rational confines
of bourgeois
culture
Pa Ubu
Initial Reactions: Ambivalence
• first staged in
Paris,1896
• riot ensued
• violently booed and
applauded
• compared with the work
of Shakespeare
• dismissed as a poor joke
• called an inspiration to
modern youth
Ma Ubu
Why Audience Rioted
•
•
•
vulgarity, cruelty, and
obscenity
theatrical equivalent of an
‘‘anarchist’’ bomb attack
and as an act of political
subversion
in no way constituted a
‘‘serious’’ piece of
literature or of theater but
rather a gigantic hoax
Parody: The Means of Attacking the
Powers that Be
• the classics
• theatrical conventions
• the middle class and
their customs
• religious, political, and
social institutions
The Theater of that Time
• entertainment that catered to a bourgeois
public, anything but a place for
experimentation
• dominant model was the well-made play, a
tradition of technique over content
• growing trend toward realism in the theatre
• realistic theater was supposed to make the
audience 'believe' in ways that they had never
been asked to before
Ubu: No Holds Barred
• embodies stupidity,
brutality, and ferociousness
• conceived as hideous,
grotesque, with a pearshaped head, practically no
hair and an enormous,
flabby stomach
• symbolizes everything that
was pushy and piggy about
the bourgeoisie
• represents the uncontrolled
unconscious forces
Jarry’s Theater--Characteristics
• fascinated with the possibilities of
theatrical space (the theatrical
"spectacle")
• relatively uninterested in dialogue,
story-lines and character
development.
• draws upon puppet shows and plays
performed by marionettes
• attempts to create a flat or twodimensional theater ("an ABSTRACT
theater") by using placards to
announce the time and location of the
dramatic action and to take the place
of scenery and on-stage crowds
Ma and Pa Ubu
Origins of the Play: High School
Prank
• was initially a simple schoolboy satire
written when Jarry attended the Lycée
de Rennes
• made fun of Jarry’s physics professor,
who was "an enormously fat,
ridiculous and ineffectual figure"
• embodied everything that Jarry was
growing to hate―the world's first truly
unredeemable character
• burlesques Shakespeare’s Macbeth,
Julius Caesar, and Richard III to tell
the story of Ma and Pa Ubu's rise to
power
Theatrical Innovations—Breaking with
Tradition
• staccato manner of
speaking
• the misplaced accents
• the puppet-like
movement
• the use of masks
• the use of placards
• the hodge-podge style
of scenic painting
Use of the Mask
• to reinforce the impression
that the actors on stage were
actually "man-sized
marionettes“
• to frustrate the ambition of
the actors to be stars
• to frustrate the desire of the
audience to escape from its
own situation and identify
with its own particular vice