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Alfred Jarry: Ubu Roi 1896
Jarry’s play Ubu Roi - (Ubu the King) was first performed at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris in
December 1896 and became instantly notorious. It was bizarre, scatalogical and coarse-humoured, it shocked its audience - though the artists in the audience heralded it as a revolutionary breakthrough. Ubu Roi is seen by many artists and critics as a precursor to the DADA anti-art movement of 1916-1919, and to the Surrealists and Theatre of the Absurd genres of the 1920s on. Jarry was associated with the Symbolists - the quasi-aesthetic movement of the latter 19th century whose artists included Beardsley, Odilon Redon, Gauguin, Whistler, Munch and Henri Rousseau, and who were concerned with the spiritual and psychological meanings of art, and whose work was characterised by interest in the senses, in the occult, the world of dreams and the unconscious, and melancholy, morbidity and death. Jarry generates a satirical, absurdist take on these subjects, and pulls them together with a story based on his reactions to the odd character of one of his school teachers - Frédéric Hébert - whose name was often shortened to Ubu. Jarry invented a philosophy of Pataphysics - ‘a science of imaginary solutions’, that deals with pseudo-scientific and nonsensical ‘explanations’ and interpretations of reality, and this doctrine permeated his literary and theatrical work...Jarry was rediscovered in the 1960s, and became part of the mythology of Modernism...
Antonin Artaud - photo-montage storyboard for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi 1925 Artaud captures the absurdity of Jarry’s play in this 1920s production planning.