Pa and Ma Ubu

Here’s our Archaeopteryxmas tableau for 2017

        'The action which is about to begin takes place in Poland, that is to say, nowhere'

        Alfred Jarry to the audience on the first night, 11 December 1896

 

Act 1 Scene 1. Pa Ubu, Ma Ubu. 

 

PA UBU. Pshite!*

MA UBU. Oh! that’s a fine thing. What a pig you are, Pa Ubu!

PA UBU. Watch out I don’t kill you, Ma Ubu!

MA UBU. It isn’t me you ought to kill, Pa Ubu, it’s someone else.

*’Merdre’ in the French

 

PA UBU. Now by my green candle, I don’t understand.

MA UBU. What! Pa Ubu, you’re content with your lot?

PA UBU. Now by my green candle, pshite. Madam, certainly yes, I’m content. I could be content with less. After all, I’m Captain of Dragoons, Privy Councillor to King Wenceslas, Knight of the Red Eagle of Poland, and formerly King of Aragon. What more do you want?

 

MA UBU. What! After being King of Aragon, you’re content with reviewing fifty flunkies armed with cabbage-cutters, when you could put the crown of Poland on your head where the crown of Aragon used to be?

PA UBU. Ah, Ma Ubu, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.

MA UBU. You are so stupid.

 

PA UBU. Now by my green candle, King Wenceslas is very much alive. And suppose he dies – hasn’t he got legions of children?

MA UBU. What prevents you from slaughtering the whole family and putting yourself in their place?

 

PA UBU. Ah! Ma Ubu, you do me wrong. Watch out you don’t end up in the  soup.*

MA UBU. Poor unfortunate, when I’m in the soup who’ll patch the seat of your trousers?

PA UBU. Who cares? Isn’t my arse just like everybody else’s?

* ‘Par la casserole’ (‘by the pot’)

MA UBU. If I were in your place, I’d want to plant that arse on a throne. You could make lots of money, and eat all the sausages you want, and roll through the streets in a carriage.

PA UBU. If I were king, I’d wear a big wide-brimmed hat, the kind I had in Aragon, the one those Spanish rogues stole from me.

MA UBU. You could also obtain an umbrella and a big cape that would fall to your heels.

 

PA UBU. Ah! I yield to temptation. Buggery pshite, pshitey buggery!* If I ever run into him in a corner of the woods, he’ll pass a bad quarter of an hour!

MA UBU. Ah! well, Pa Ubu, now you’re acting like a real man.

* ‘Bougre de merdre, merdre de bougre’

 

 

PA UBU. No, no! Me – Captain of Dragoons – slaughter the King of Poland? I’d sooner die!

 

MA UBU (aside). Oh, pshite! – (Aloud) Would you rather remain as beggarly as a rat, Pa Ubu?

 

PA UBU. Bluebelly, by my green candle, I’d rather be a poor beggar like a skinny brave rat than rich like a wicked fat cat.*

MA UBU. And the broad-brimmed hat? And the umbrella? And the big cape?

PA UBU. And then what, Ma Ubu?

He leaves, banging the door.

* ‘Ventrebleu, de par ma chandelle verte, j'aime mieux être gueux comme un maigre et brave rat que riche comme un méchant et gras chat.’

MA UBU (alone). Vrout, pshite! He’s slow to understand, but vrout, pshite! I believe he’s been shaken. Thanks to God and myself, in eight days I may be Queen of Poland.

THE FIRST EQUESTRIAN SCENE 

Jarry asked his producer for 'a cardboard horse's head which (Ubu) would hang round his neck, as they did on the English medieval stage, for the only two equestrian scenes'  (letter to Lugné-Poe, 8 January 1896)

Act 3 Scene 8  

PA UBU. And now I’m going to get up on my horse. Bring, gentlemen, the Horse of Phynances.

MA UBU. Pa Ubu, your horse won’t be able to carry you. It hasn’t eaten anything for five days and is nearly dead.

PA UBU. How do you like that! They make me pay 12 coins a day for this nag, and she cannot carry me.  All right, bring me another beast, but I won’t go on foot. Horn-belly!*

They bring in an enormous horse.

PA UBU. I’m getting on. Oh! I’d better sit because I am going to fall. (The horse starts.) Ah! Stop my beast! Great God, I’m going to fall and die!!!

*Cornegiduille

 

MA UBU. He is indeed an imbecile. Ah, he’s up. But now he’s down.

PA UBU. Fizzihorn*, I’m half dead. But it doesn’t matter. I’m off to war and I will kill everybody. Anybody who steps out of line I’ll fix with twisting of the nose and teeth and extraction of the tongue.

MA UBU. Good luck, Mister Ubu. 

*Corne physique

Alfred Jarry

‘AFTER US THE SAVAGE GOD’

W.B.Yeats was at the opening night with Arthur Symons:

Yeats

'I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi at the Théatre de L'Oeuvre...The audience shake their fists at one another, and the Rhymer whispers to me 'There are often duels after these performances'. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for sceptre a brush of the kind we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, 'After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle rhythms, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible?  After us the Savage God.'   

Symons

‘The play is the first symbolist farce: it has the crudity of the schoolboy or a savage: what is, after all, most remarkable about it is the insolence with which a young writer mocks at civilization itself, sweeping all art, along with all humanity, into the same inglorious slop-pail … it has been given twice over, before a crowded house, howling but dominated, a house buffeted into sheer bewilderment by the wooden lath of a gross undiscriminating, infantile Philosopher-Pantaloon…Ubu Roi is the gesticulation of a young savage of the woods … In our search for sensation, we have exhausted sensation … a literary Sansculotte has shrieked for hours that unspeakable word of the gutter which was the refrain.’   Arthur Symons 

Mendès

'Whistles? Yes! Screams of rage and ill-tempered laughter? Yes. Torn-up seats about to fly on stage? Yes. The boxes vociferous and shaking their fists? Yes, in a word, a crowd enraged at being tricked….But, nevertheless, make no mistake, there was nothing indifferent about these performances….From out of the ruckus came a shout: ‘You would not have understood Shakespeare!’ He was right. Let me make myself clear. I am not saying at all that Alfred Jarry is Shakespeare; in him everything Ariostophanic has been turned into a repulsive puppet show or a squalid fairground attraction, but believe it or not, despite the nonsensical action and its mediocre structure, a new type has been put before us, created by an extravagant and brutal imagination that is more that of a child than a man.

Père Ubu exists.

…As for the abundantly ignominious vocabulary employed by the protagonists of this inept and astonishing play: moments arise in every century when the pavements split and the sewers, like volcanoes, must explode and ejaculate.’  

Catulle Mendès

 

The original French text is here. Our translation is adapted from Patrick Whittaker's, which you can read here.

Hats off to Nada Theatre for their unforgettable Ubu, which we saw performed with vegetables and fruit at the 1992 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

   

Lisa's drawings from our 1992 Edinburgh diary

Hats off to the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, keeping alive the spirit of Alfred Jarry and his Science of Imaginary Solutions.

Hats off  to Atlas Press and the Bookartbookshop for their beautiful editions of Alfred Jarry and other 'emissions of the anti-tradition'. I recommend Adventures in 'Pataphysics, where you can read Jarry on 'The Habits of the Drowned' and 'Cynegetics of the Omnibus' (catching Paris buses as big game hunting).

Hats off to Jean-Christophe Averty, who died in March this year. Feast your eyes on his magnificent 1965 television version of Ubu Roi, on Ubuweb. 

Hats off to Adrian Henri, who brought Pa Ubu to life in Liverpool in the 1960s.

Hats off to Alastair Brotchie's Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life.

In Brotchie’s book I found this 1896 review of the published play, by Louis Dumur: 

‘Ubu is a summary in caricature of everything wretched, cowardly, contemptible and disgusting that lurks in the human animal living in society. A cruel glutton, a mastodon of selfishness and vanity, a self-important swine inflated with stupidity and stuffed with presumption, this epic marionette, reigning over Poland by means of an all-powerful ‘phynance stick’, the 'phynance pistol’ and the ‘schit-hook’, wonderfully sympbilizes the apotheosis of the belly and the triumph of the snout in universal history.’

Does that description remind you of anyone?