Ubu Plays, The (2 page)

In January 1896, Jarry was introduced to Lugné-Poe, the director of the Théâtre de l‘Œuvre, and proposed to him the production of either
Ubu Roi
(in a revised version) or
Les Polyèdres
(his original title for the first version of
Ubu Cocu
). In June, Lugné-Poe invited Jarry to become secrétaire-régisseur of his company, and this same month saw the publication by Vallette of
Ubu Roi
, which was greeted by mainly favourable critical reviews. Jarry now abandoned the idea of having Les Polyèdres produced at the Théâtre de I’Œuvre and decided to concentrate instead on persuading Lugné-Poe to stage
Ubu Roi
. His campaign for his play eventually conquered Lugné-Poe’s doubts, and it received its first performance on December 10th, 1896. The scenes of violence and pandemonium that accompanied this notorious première have been frequently recounted and commented upon. The theatre critics took over the battle from the screaming, whistling, fist-shaking audience the following day, and continued the duel of insults from the pages of their newspapers, while in the cafés and salons of Paris the mutual recriminations between supporters and opponents of the play raged unabated for weeks. There were two results, one long-term and the other immediate: the French theatre was never the same again, and Jarry suddenly found himself famous overnight. His friends soon began to address him as ‘Père Ubu’, and he reciprocated by adopting the language, manners and gait of his creation.

In 1898,
Ubu Roi
was performed again by the marionettes of the artist Pierre Bonnard’s Théâtre des Pantins. It was probably during this or the previous year that Jarry completed another version of the second play in the Ubu cycle,
Ubu Cocu ou l’Archéopteryx
, but failed to find a publisher for it. Indeed neither version of
Ubu Cocu
was either published or performed during Jarry’s lifetime, and the play had to wait until 1944 to see the light of day, when an edition of the second version was printed from a manuscript which had been acquired by Paul Eluard.

During 1899, Jarry worked on the third play in the Ubu cycle,
Ubu Enchaîné,
and completed it in September. Although published the following year, it was only in 1937 that this play received its first performance, in a production by Sylvain Itkine, together with Jarry’s unpublished playlet
L’Objet Aimé
as a curtain-raiser. In 1899, and again in 1901, Jarry published an
Almanach Illustré du Père Ubu
which contained pungent comments by the Master of Phynances on the world around him, illustrated wittily by Bonnard. Jarry was also engaged in rewriting
Ubu Roi
as a two-act guignol version, with songs, and this fourth play in the Ubu cycle, renamed
Ubu sur la Butte
, was performed in November 1901 by the marionettes of the Théâtre Guignol des Gueules de Bois, although it was not published until 1906, one year before his death.

During the fifteen short years between the first night of Ubu Roi and his death at the age of 34 Jarry had seen his career as a playwright checked: once the initial impact of
Ubu Roi
had worn off, it seemed that neither producers nor publishers were anxious to invest their money and reputation in the subsequent developments of the Ubu theme, and Jarry could not persuade even his closest friends in the publishing business to print more than a few fragments of
Ubu Cocu
. It must be remembered, too, that during these years Jarry was pursuing with equal singlemindedness several parallel careers, as poet, novelist, journalist, literary and art critic, artist-engraver and fine arts editor (the glorious but brief period of L’Ymagier and Perhinderion, two luxurious art reviews which soon swallowed up the modest fortune he had inherited on the death of his father), as well as playing the strenuous and deadly serious roles of court jester to the avant-garde intelligentsia, and compulsive alcoholic, under conditions of increasingly desperate poverty. His most important non-dramatic work, standing apart from but complementing the Ubu plays, was
Les Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien
, a book which defies classification and in which Jarry elaborated his Science of Pataphysics (the ‘science of imaginary solutions’ which ‘will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one ...’). This extraordinary, Rabelaisian ‘neo-scientific novel’ completely baffled even his closest friends in the literary world, and only a few chapters from the book were published, by the Mercure de France review, during his lifetime. Jarry himself seemed to have foreseen this impasse when he wrote on the last page of his manuscript of Faustroll, under the word ‘END’: ‘This book will not be published integrally until the author has acquired sufficient experience to savour all its beauties in full‘, and indeed it was not published until 1911, four years after his death. As Roger Shattuck has written: ‘At twenty-five Jarry suggested he was writing over everyone’s head, including his own; he had to “experience” death in order to catch up with himself.’
¹

This is not the place to attempt either an examination of the aims of this very complex writer, or an assessment of his impact on the development of twentieth-century French drama and literature,
²
but two basic points require to be made: first, that Alfred Jarry was, of course, very much more than the sum of his Ubus, and that the Ubu plays achieve their full dimension within the context of Jarry’s writings on the theatre and, indeed, his whole
œuvre,
especially Faustroll;
³
secondly, that the three Ubu plays are not to be taken as a simple sequence of tragi-comic farces woven around the monstrous central figure of Ubu. There is a basic affinity between
Ubu Roi
and
Ubu Cocu
, the first an adaptation by Jarry of an existing text in a continuing schoolboy saga, the second an original contribution to that same saga, and although Jarry later revised both these texts he never departed from the norms set by the small anonymous army of juvenile satirists of the Rennes lycée.
Ubu Enchaîné
, on the other hand, was the mature work of a twenty-six-year-old author, a detached and consciously contrived exposition of the pataphysical identity of opposites (freedom versus slavery, in this instance) that had already been expressed spontaneously in
Ubu Cocu
and was implicit in
Ubu Roi
. The year before writing
Ubu Enchaîné
Jarry had completed Faustroll, thus codifying his Science of Pataphysics. He was also in a position to draw upon his experience in the professional theatre to impose a certain dramatic discipline on the structure of his new play. The three Ubus do, nevertheless, constitute a real trinity, in which - if one may coin a pious metaphor -
Ubu Roi
may be considered the Father,
Ubu Cocu
the Son, and
Ubu Enchaîné
the Holy Ghost....

Finally, a word about these translations. Jarry’s use of language in the Ubu plays is as unusual as the events he recounts. The schoolboy jargon, the changes in pace and style between staccato repartee and mock-Shakespearean heroic declamation, the puns and obscure jokes all present their particular problems. And then there are the ingenious verbal inventions. The highly suggestive oaths
(merdre, cornegidouille, cornephynance),
insults
(bouffresque, salopin, bourrique)
and anatomical references
(bouzine, giborgne, oneilles)
which abound, particularly in the two earlier plays, derive directly from the accumulated repertory of slang of the Hébertique saga of Rennes, and challenge one to find suitable equivalents in English. How is one to duplicate the majestic, tongue-rolling sonority of the word merdre, given only our bleak, unheroic ‘shit’ to work on? The aerated hiss of ‘pschitt’ provides some labial satisfaction, but can only be considered the best of several inadequate alternatives. On the other hand, Cyril Connolly’s triumphant conversion of cornegidouille into hornstrumpot gave the English language a new expletive when in 1945 he first presented his version of
Ubu Cocu
in the pages of Horizon.

We have inserted into our joint translation of
Ubu Roi
those of the songs from the guignol version,
Ubu sur la Butte,
which could be easily carried over: each such excerpt is clearly indicated in the text, so that for purposes of stage production it will be a simple matter of choice as to whether or not the songs shall be incorporated. We did not complete the Ubu cycle by translating the whole of
Ubu sur la Butte
, since this two-act guignol reduction of
Ubu Roi
is mainly of literary interest today, even for those interested in the marionette theatre.

An indispensable companion for the student of Ubu who reads French is Maurice Saillet’s impeccably scholarly Tout Ubu (Le Livre de Poche, Paris, 1962), which contains not only all the Ubu plays, but also a ‘Chronologie du Père Ubu’, the two
Almanachs du Père Ubu,
and a number of important documents concerning the triumphs and vicissitudes of the Master of Phynances, whom Cyril Connolly was once inspired to dub, prophetically, the ‘Santa Claus of the Atomic Age’.

SIMON WATSON TAYLOR

Ubu Rex

(Ubu Roi)

Drama in five Acts
in prose
Restored in its entirety
as it was performed by
the marionettes of the Theâtre
des Phynances in 1888

Translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor

COMPOSITION OF THE ORCHESTRA
⁴

This Book
is dedicated
to
MARCEL SCHWOB

Thereatte Lord Ubu shooke his peare-head, whence he
is by the Englysshe yclept Shakespeare, and you have from
him under thatte name many goodlie tragedies
in his own hande.

CHARACTERS

PA UBU

MA UBU

CAPTAIN MACNURE

KING WENCESLAS

QUEEN ROSAMUND

GENERAL LASKI

STANISLAS LESZCZYNSKI

JOHN SOBIESKI III

NICOLAS RENSKI

THE TSAR ALEXIS

CONSPIRATORS and SOLDIERS

PEOPLE

MICHAEL FEDOROVITCH

NOBLES

JUDGES

COUNSELLORS

FINANCIERS

LACKEYS OF THE PHYNANCES

PEASANTS

THE ENTIRE RUSSIAN ARMY

THE ENTIRE POLISH ARMY

MA UBU’S GUARDS

A CAPTAIN

THE BEAR

THE PHYNANCE CHARGER

THE DEBRAINING MACHINE

THE CREW

THE SEA-CAPTAIN

The play was originally presented by Lugné-Poe and the Théâtre de l’Œuvre at the Salle du Nouveau Théâtre on December 10th, 1896. The direction was by Lugné-Poe with décor by Paul Sérusier, masks by Alfred Jarry and music by Claude Terrasse.

The cast included Firmin Gémier as Père Ubu and Louise France as Mère Ubu.