Ubu E-Book

Alfred Jarry

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. This Drama Classics edition of Ubu contains three plays following the adventures of Pa and Ma Ubu in their absurd world: King Ubu, Cuckold Ubu and Slave Ubu. It is translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish, the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE UBU PLAYS

by Alfred Jarry

translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Translator’s Note

Introduction

For Further Reading

Jarry: Key Dates

KING UBU (Ubu roi)

CUCKOLD UBU (Ubu cocu)

SLAVE UBU (Ubu enchaîné)

Appendix: UP UBU (Ubu sur la butte)

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Translator’s Note

The translation of Ubu Roi printed here was commissioned by Hilary Norrish for the BBC World Service, and was first performed in her production by a cast including Alan Armstrong, Alan Corduner, Pip Donaghy, Richard Pearce, Alison Peebles and Emily Richard. The first stage production, at the Gate Theatre, London in April 1997, was directed by John Wright, designed by David Roger and performed by Allison Cologna, Frazer Corbyn, Mark Stuart Currie, Stephen Finegold, Jonathan Ferguson, Joanna Holden, Jonny Hoskins, Richard Katz and Asta Sighvats.

Introduction

Alfred Henri Jarry (1873-1907)

Jarry was born and brought up in the provinces, but went to Paris at eighteen to study philosophy. (His professor was the famous Henri Bergson.) Already comic writing was his passion. From the age of twelve onwards he had composed verse, playlets, and nonsense-stories parodying the fiction of the time: typical titles are The Umbrella-Syringe of Doctor Death, Roupias Tsunami-head and Fishing Overture. At the same age, in company with two school friends, he had also amused himself by writing satirical sketches about his schoolteachers, and one of these, The Poles, was later reworked as King Ubu (Ubu roi), first play in the Ubu cycle.

The extraordinary energy of the three Ubu plays, and their cult status in European drama, have all but eclipsed everything else Jarry wrote or did. From student days onwards he supported himself as a writer, producing everything from reviews and satirical essays to music-hall songs, from mock philosophy to fiction. His ‘novels’ The Supermale and The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician are absurd masterpieces, anticipating the stories of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino on the one hand, and the satires of Stephen Leacock, James Thurber and Flann O’Brien on the other. The more people laughed, the more seriously he set his face, pretending that he was a genuine philosophical visionary and developing the spoof system of pataphysics. This, he said, was a ‘science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments’ – that is, one in which appearance is reality, and vice versa. (Its origins are the infants’ game of ‘No means Yes’, and its implications are worked out before our eyes in Slave Ubu.)

In daily life, Jarry was eccentric in the gentle, melancholic vein also favoured by his contemporary, the composer Erik Satie. He was just under five feet tall and slight, dressed always in black and sported long black hair and a pointed beard which made him look like a miniature Mephistopheles. With a group of like-minded friends, he cultivated the art of living, as he put it, for the ‘exquisite moment’, of taking very seriously the business of taking nothing seriously at all. He rode a bicycle excitedly and energetically, as if it were a charger, sometimes into bars and houses as well as in the street. In admiration of Buffalo Bill, one of his heroes, he shot lighted cigarettes from people’s mouths – with a popgun. He alternated between dandyism and never washing.

Jarry loved to play the part of Pa Ubu in real life, swaggering like a foul-mouthed little boy in a playground, indulging in orgies of food and, most especially, drink. He was an exponent of street theatre, happy to stand up and lecture passersby on insects, pataphysics, God, ‘shikt’ or any other subject that came into his head. He drank enormous quantities of absinthe, and took ether – experiments, he said, designed to lift his soul into a state of transcendental perception. When these practices destroyed his health and he fell mortally ill, he refused treatment on the grounds that he preferred illness to the mercies of ‘merdecin’. On his sickbed, he had himself photographed as a corpse and sent his friends the photos as souvenirs.

What Happens in the Plays

In King Ubu, Pa Ubu is a cowardly toady, one of the hangers-on of Good King Wenceslas of Baloney. Nagged by his fearsome wife Ma Ubu, he gathers a band of Barmpots, led by the obnoxious Dogpile, assassinates Wenceslas and seizes the throne. He and the Barmpots fight Wenceslas’s army, led by Princes Willy, Silly and Billikins, and defeat them. Billikins escapes to the hills, where the ghosts of his ancestors give him a great big sword and order him to organise resistance.

Ubu starts his reign by crawling to the people, but soon turns into a tyrant, debraining anyone who disagrees with him, murdering all the aristocrats and middle classes and extorting triple taxes from the peasants. The peasants revolt and go over to Billikins – and Dogpile, whom Ubu has rashly insulted, defects to Tsar Alexis of All the Russkies and leads him and his army to attack Baloney and restore Billikins to the throne. Ma Ubu steals the Balonian state treasure and a handsome Balonian soldier, and flees into exile.

Defeated in battle, Pa Ubu holes up in a cave with his cronies Wallop and McClub, and barely survives when a bear attacks them. Ma Ubu eventually reaches the same cave. She and Pa Ubu make up their differences, give up all claims to the Balonian throne and set off with Wallop and McClub on a voyage of exile to Engelland.

Cuckold Ubu (Ubu cocu) is the darkest and most surreal of the plays. Pa Ubu takes up residence in the home of Peardrop, a breeder of polyhedra, and he and his Barmpots tyrannise the neighbourhood, despite the efforts of Pa Ubu’s Conscience and Peardrop to stop them. There is war, led on Peardrop’s side by Memnon (the singing Egyptian statue with whom Ma Ubu is cuckolding Pa Ubu) and by the banker Swankipants, and eventually a crocodile appears in true Punch-and-Judy style to chase off all the others. (We don’t know whether it does or not: the play as it survives is incomplete.)

In Slave Ubu (Ubu enchaîné, ‘Ubu in chains’) Pa Ubu decides that he has had enough of tyranny, and that the only way to be free is to become a slave. He attaches himself and Ma Ubu to the dear old man Peebock and his daughter Eleutheria, and rules their household. The Three Free Men and their Sergeant Pisseasy (Eleutheria’s fiancé) come to the rescue, and Ma and Pa Ubu are transferred to jail, preparatory to being sold as galley-slaves to Sultan Suleiman of Turkishland. The jail is so comfortable that the Three Free Men and the Populace break in to become convicts themselves. Two convoys of convicts set out to Turkishland, one consisting of the Ubs and the convicts (who have generously exchanged clothes and manacles with their guards) and the other led by Pisseasy. Sultan Suleiman makes them all galley slaves, and they row into the sunset and live happily ever after.

The Ubu Plays

It is common everywhere, but in France it has been a longstanding literary tradition, for bright adolescents to mock their schoolteachers. The eighteenth-century philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau were merciless about their tutors. Charles Bovary’s classmates do it in Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (perhaps in deference to Flaubert’s own custom of inventing embarrassing and painful adventures, not for publication, for those of his characters he disliked). The tradition continues in ‘grand’ literature such as André Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters, and in such not-so-grand literature as French children’s comics. But Jarry’s Ubu plays are the only case in which such lampoons survive to become adult obsessions, or are developed into such influential works of art.

The original skits were the work not of Jarry but of two of his friends, the brothers Charles and Henri Morin. Jarry soon joined in, giving the brothers’ ideas literary edge and bite, and reworking them as playlets. The boys’ favourite butt was a fat physics teacher, Monsieur Hébert, known to his pupils as ‘Pa Ébé’, ‘Éb’ and ‘Ébouille’. Hébert, at least in his pupils’ opinion, was a sadist, and Jarry later claimed that he was also the quintessence of bourgeois vulgarity, ‘grotesquerie incarnate’. In the comedy sketch The Poles, written when the boys were fourteen and fifteen, Ébé has absurd, Rabelaisian adventures in Poland – and this material was reworked soon afterwards into the first version of King Ubu, in which Ubu’s ambitious wife emulates Lady Macbeth and nags her husband into killing the King and usurping his throne.

This first version of King Ubu was first staged, by puppets, when Jarry was fifteen. It seems to have obsessed him from that moment onwards, and he spent much of the next three years adding material, polishing, illustrating, writing songs and making stage designs. As soon as he went to Paris, he sent the play (now substantially as it survives) to Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poë, the avant-garde actor and director who had brought Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to France and was involved with such experimental writers as the early symbolists, especially Maurice Maeterlinck. Lugné-Poë mounted a performance by live actors of King Ubu in 1896, and his and Jarry’s production (involving masks, costumes of painted cardboard, hobby-horses, and the dehumanisation, or perhaps one should say puppetisation, of the actors), not to mention the play’s very first word (merdre, ‘shikt’), outraged the bourgeois audience and caused a scandal not matched until the première of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring nearly two decades later. In 1898 the play was revived in a puppet theatre belonging to Jarry’s friend, the painter Pierre Bonnard, and yet another revision, Up Ubu (Ubu sur la butte), was performed by the marionettes of the Théâtre guignol des gueules de bois in 1901: see Appendix, page 124. The ‘sequels’ Cuckold Ubu and Slave Ubu were written in the 1890s and performed in various versions during that time. Jarry never produced a definitive version of Cuckold Ubu; Slave Ubu was first published in 1900.

The Ubu plays, and particularly King Ubu, quickly became one of the most influential avant-garde creations of the new century. Generations of writers, painters, musicians and above all theatre writers and performers were inspired by the way Jarry pushed parody and inconsequentiality to a point where the work seemed to exist only in its own self-created, lunatic world, with an arrogant sure-footedness that had nothing to do with anything which had existed earlier. Among the movements owing debts to the plays were Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, Futurism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Their influence can be traced right to such individual creations as the Marx Brothers films and Hellzapoppin’ in the 1930s, the Goon Show and ‘Mad’ magazine in the 1950s, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and films such as Airplane and the ‘Naked Gun’ series in the 1980s. Jarry’s work liberated other people’s creative imagination. His irreverence towards pre-existing culture, to his audience, his performers and the world at large, and the plays’ absolute self-certainty – what Jarry called je m’en foutisme (‘stuffyouism’) – prefigured a whole twentieth-century approach to the arts and their audiences, first in Europe and then throughout the world.

The Ubu plays’ dehumanisation of actors, their surrealism, parody and linguistic experimentation may nowadays seem to us to be absolutely characteristic of a particular time and style in the arts: the first of many challenges flung in the face of nineteenth-century creative certainties and the eager adoption of experiment of all kinds which marked the turn of the twentieth century. But the plays’ power to shock outlasted the age of their creation and outranked all imitations. In the 1980s, when communist tyrannies began to collapse throughout Eastern Europe, King Ubu was a favourite theatre text everywhere, and was talked of not as a piece of pure fun but as a forceful and subversive political allegory. Throughout the plays’ life they have had – and perhaps still have today – extraordinary power not only to entertain, but to make their audiences think. Without a single Brechtian inflection, they are supreme examples of what he called dialectical theatre – except that, characteristically of Jarry, they preach no message but allow you to read into them any ideas you like, or none at all.

The Puppet Tradition

Jarry was quite happy if people were outraged by his Ubu plays or dismissed them (as one contemporary critic did) as no more than ‘iconoclastic exhibitionism’. He wrote tongue-in-cheek articles and gave lectures disclaiming the controversies while vigorously stoking them. But in fact, the plays’ style has far simpler origins than the desire to shock. They are those of the European puppet theatre, with its centuries-old tradition of satirical outspokenness and grotesquerie. This existed from medieval times, when performances by live actors were first banned by the Christian authorities, and survived both in popular forms (such as Punch and Judy or Kharaghiozis) and in upper-class puppet entertainments drawing inspiration from the commedia dell’arte and The Arabian Nights – almost every European ‘great house’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had its puppet theatre.

Jarry was an expert on this tradition. He gave puppet performances from his early teens, and in 1893 wrote a prize-winning essay on the Guignol (marionette) tradition in Europe. He always preferred puppet performances of the Ubu plays to live ones, and when live productions were mounted, he used every technique of puppet staging to make his actors look like marionettes – except, as he innocently pointed out to one audience, attaching strings to their arms and legs, ‘which would be ridiculous’. Guignol characters – the swashbuckling Knight, the Blackamoor, the Egyptian, the crocodile, the cutout army and especially the grotesque, stickwielding anarchist at the heart of the action and his nagging, putupon (and sometimes beaten-up) wife – are a main part of Jarry’s inspiration, and the guignol style (later also used in silent film slapstick) of performing, deadpan, the wildest, most lunatic inventions, gives his plays their life.

Language

The language of the plays, similarly, has far less ‘iconoclastic’ origins than one might imagine. Jarry’s characters speak for most of the time in playground slang, larded with secret words, puns and cocky, never-quite-gutter vocabulary (of which ‘shikt’, the plays’ favourite rude word, is an example). Rabelais is a powerful influence – in later life, Jarry wrote a stage treatment of Rabelais’ novel Pantagruel, and the imaginary France, Baloney, Russkiland and Engelland of the Ubu plays, with their posturing grandees, ‘poofiprofs’ and bourgeois fascination with huge meals and rivers of drink, are close to Rabelais’ invented Abbey Thélème (‘Do as you Please’), the goal to which all characters in Pantagruel progress. The chief difference is that although Pa Ubu shares with Rabelais’ characters an obsession with money, blood, guts and the chamber pot, he is largely indifferent to that other great Rabelaisian appetite: for sex. At the same time, Jarry’s scenes and dialogue keep veering into literary parody: of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo (author of Les misérables and The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame), the melodramas of Sardou, academic treatises on science and philosophy, the swashbuckling novels of Alexandre Dumas (especially The Three Musketeers) and the pious Lives of the Holy Saints and Martyrs published by the Roman Catholic Church in Jarry’s time. As the action progresses, language (especially Pa Ubu’s) seems to collapse altogether, words coalescing and imploding as if dream were taking over from (what passes for) reality. Even the plays’ ferocious gusto – they never stop, splattergunning the audience with cleverness – has what is really no more than schoolboy verve.

Location of the Action

The skits from which King Ubu was born were set in Pologne (‘Poland’), and Jarry kept this location in the play, to give a kind of feudal, knightly resonance which he sent up in the battle and court scenes. But in a lecture given before the 1896 performance, he said that his ‘Poland’ was actually ‘Nowhere at all’, a surreal, invented place – and pologne is also French for a particularly phallic kind of sausage, rather like the salamis and ‘German’ sausages which feature in English pantomime and Punch and Judy shows. In this translation, I have renamed Poland Baloney and made other consequent changes. The other two plays are set in a France as imaginary as JohnBullLand might be to an English satirist. The English names in this translation are versions of similar puns or slangy distortions in the original French.

Kenneth McLeish, 1997

For Further Reading

Jarry is scandalously undervalued in English. The best book, Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1959) deals with the epoch, not just the man, and is now four decades old. K.S. Beaumont, Alfred Jarry: a Critical and Biographical Study (1984) is rather po-faced for its subject, but covers all the ground. Martin Esslin, in Theatre of the Absurd (1962), is brief but good both on Jarry and his influence in later avant-garde theatre.

Jarry’s novels The Supermale and Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician were both published in English in the 1960s, and are ‘useful’ as well as fascinating and enjoyable. For those who read French, the Livre de Poche collection Tout Ubu is precisely what its title claims, and Henri Béhar’s books Jarry, le monstre et la marionette (1973) and Jarry dramaturge (1980) are excellent critical studies.

Jarry: Key Dates

1873

Born.

1879-88

At school in Saint-Brieuc.

1885

Begins to write.

1888-91

At school in Rennes.

1888

First script of The Poles.

1891-3

Student in Paris.

1894-5

Military service (invalided out).

1895

Mercure de France publishes (first in sections, then complete) Caesar-Antichrist, a play made up of scenes from King Ubu.

1896

First production of King Ubu; scandal; first publication under its own name.

1898

Marionette production, at Pierre Bonnard’s theatre. Jarry publishes a ‘pseudo-pornographic’ novelette, which includes part of Cuckold Ubu.

1900

Slave Ubu published.

1901

Ubu sur la butte first produced; novel Messalina published.

1902

The Supermale.

1903

Jarry working on Pantagruel and a comic opera about Pope Joan.

1906

Jarry falls mortally ill.

1907

Dies.