Theater Arts: Ubu Roi, by Alfred Jarry

Ubu Roi

2005

I . Alfred Jarry (1873-1907 ) is considered to be the father of the theatre avant-guard , a new revolutionary style that appeared in the European theatre at the end of the XIX century (a so called fin de siecle ) to prosper for a very long time . Provoked by the philosophy of Schopenhauer , Nietzsche , Heidegger , Kierkegaard and , of course , Freud the avant-garde phenomenon was there to sum up the previous century literature experience and to dethrone the positivist tradition which controlled childish human minds and fooled them with the nonsensical

promises of progress and evolution through the years . Actually what avant-guard , and particularly the avant-guard theatre , intended to do and finally succeeded in is a narrow-minded bourgeois forms of art and establishing new declarative and shocking , usually scandalous and completely irrational artworks Jarry 's play Ubu Roi , written by the 14-years old lyceum pupil-ribald as a parody on his arbitrary Physics teacher , was first staged in 1896 in one of the French experimental theatres , Oeuvre ' in Paris , and stirred a great scandal . It was neither a success nor a failure : actually people were waiting for Alfred Jarry to come on the stage and confirm their timid guess that the play was just a joke Jarry never did that . The Paris intelligentsia , educated on the best examples of the French classicism , was shocked by the obscene words and unusual form of the play that , for this reason , couldn 't be staged anymore and was forgotten for a long time till its resurrection by the surrealists in the 1920s . Since then Ubu Roi ' undoubtedly occupies the first place in the list of avant-guard prophecy scriptures and is considered to be the manifest for almost all the nihilistic modernistic trends such as symbolism , dadaism , surrealism , futurism etc . This tragifarce was as bold as to overturn all possible theatre conventions and audience expectations as well as simply to shock the bourgeois public . Jarry 's intention realized just the right way . His play looks like a parody on the canonical texts of Shakespeare , Cornel and Reassign and still no one knows how to stage this play properly . Jarry 's riddle which started as an infantile ambition overgrew in one of the most polysemantic and disputable plays of the XX century

II . Alfred Jarry and his followers cast doubt on the efficiency of the contemporary theatre system . Actually it was surrealism , inspired by Jarry 's epatage revolution , that turned from the dramatic primacy in the theatre art : surrealists claim that drama violates an acting itself and ruins an actor 's freedom to create an image . The vanguard theater stands for the renovated theatre - dynamical , improvising , simultaneous , unreal and irrational . It takes away the power from the words and gives it to the action : nowadays , when language names things no more and is nothing but a storage of simulacra , only performance or happening can matter With the advent of Alfred Jarry on the literature stage the place of drama have been reserved by small theatrical scenes , sometimes...