Ubu Roi, Ou, Les Polonais
When Alfred Jarry's play opened in Paris in 1896, its very first word - 'Merde!' - scandalized the audience and changed theater forever. Developed from a schoolboy farce, Ubu Roi follows the grotesque ascent of Père Ubu, a blustering, cowardly captain who murders his way to the Polish throne at his wife's urging. What unfolds is a dizzying parade of absurd violence, bureaucratic nonsense, and petty tyranny - Ubu taxes the peasants into starvation, executes anyone who displeases him, and ultimately flees in his underwear when the people rise up against him. Jarry's satirical target is the bourgeois brute latent in all of us: the man who achieves power and immediately abuses it with grotesque complacency. The play reads like a fever dream, its dialogue looping and nonsense, its logic the logic of a nightmare. Yet somehow it predicted the twentieth century's totalitarian horrors with eerie precision. Ubu Roi is the grandfather of absurdism, the secret ancestor of Beckett and Ionesco, and a work so relentlessly, violently funny that it remains genuinely shocking more than a century later. Read it if you want to understand where modern theater came from - or if you just want to laugh at a man who declares himself 'Chief of the Poles' before崩溃ing in his undergarments.
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“That's a beautiful speech, but nobody's listening. Let's go.””
— Alfred Jarry
“I intended that when the curtain went up the scene should confront the public like the exaggerating mirror in the stories of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, in which the depraved saw themselves with dragons' bodies, or bulls' horns, or whatever corresponded to their particular vice. It is not surprising that the public should have been aghast at the sight of its other self, which it had never before been shown completely. This ignoble other-self, as Monsieur Catulle Mendes has excellently said, is composed "of eternal human imbecility, eternal lust, eternal gluttony, the vileness of instinct magnified into tyranny; of the sense of decency, the virtues, the patriotism & the ideals peculiar to those who have just eaten their fill." Really, these are hardly the constituents for an amusing play, & the masks demonstrate that the comedy must at the most be the macabre comedy of an English clown, or of a Dance of Death.””
— Alfred Jarry
“If I ever meet him in a dark alley he'll have one hell of a fifteen minutes.””
— Alfred Jarry
“[Alfred] Jarry’s teaching could be summarized thus: every man is capable of showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.””
— Alfred Jarry
“As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland – that is to say, nowhere””
— Alfred Jarry
“Ah, crap! Isn't Wrong worth the same as Right?””
— Alfred Jarry
“Just as the poppy and the dandelion are scythed down in the flower of their youth by the pitiless scythe of the pitiless scyther who pitilessly scythes their pitiful pans, so poor Renski has played the pretty poppy’s pitiful part.””
— Alfred Jarry
