Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 225
French director Alain Timar directed and designed this adaptation of Ubu Roi at the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj
(Romania) in 2011. The twelve actors wear identical cream-colored long underwear and alternate in the roles of Ma and
Pa Ubu while clothing themselves, and/or stuffing their costumes, with great sheaves of white paper torn from a giant
“toilet roll” at the rear of the stage. “Merdre” indeed! © Hungarian Theatre of Cluj/István Biró
added “r” in “shrit”), far from “cleansing” the offending
obscenity, only called more attention to it and to its
deliberate intrusion onto the Parisian stage.
Ubu Roi was, in fact, quite literally a schoolboy play;
Jarry wrote the first version at the age of fifteen as a
lampoon of his high school physics teacher. Jarry was
only twenty-three years old when the play astounded
its Parisian audiences, and the juvenile aspects of the
play’s origins were evident throughout the finished
product, which proved to be Jarry’s sole masterwork: a
savage and often ludicrous satire on the theme of power
in which Father (later King) Ubu—a fat, foul-mouthed,
venal, amoral, and pompous Polish assassin—proves
one of the stage’s greatest creations. The play sprawls;
its thirty-three scenes are often just crude skits barely
linked by plot, but the interplay of farce and violence is
inspired, as in the famous dinner scene:
Father Ubu, Mother Ubu, Captain Bordure and their
followers enter the dining room.
CAPTAIN BORDURE: Hey, Mother Ubu! What delicacies have
you for us today?
MOTHER UBU: Here’s the menu: Polish soup, rat chops, veal,
chicken, dachshund pâté, turkey butt, charlotte russe . . .
FATHER UBU: Hey, that’s enough!
MOTHER UBU: No, there’s more! Iced cannonball, fruit salad,
boiled artichokes, cauliflower à la shrit.
FATHER UBU: Hey, what do you think I am, the Emperor of
Japan?
MOTHER UBU: (to the others) Don’t listen to him; he’s an
imbecile!
FATHER UBU: Hah! I’ll sharpen my teeth on your ankles!
MOTHER UBU: Eat this instead, Father Ubu. Good Polish soup!
FATHER UBU: (sips a mouthful and spits it out) Crap! That’s
terrible.