Customer Reviews

Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Silvermom's review of Ubu Roi on this site is misleading. It refers to the New Directions edition of the play, now unfortunately out of print. The Dover edition does not have the delightful line drawings, nor the added essays on theatre by Jarry. Also, I don't much care for Dover's gratuitous (and inaccurate) translation of "Ubu Roi" as "King Turd." On the other hand, as far as English translations go, Dover's is pretty much the only game in town. And Jarry's game is wonderfully worth playing, full of rambunctious anarchic high spirits. Just so you have a better idea of what you'll actually be getting.

Hugely, magnificently funny. I saw a live production of this play on an education channel some years ago. It is totally anarchic and joyful.

"Ubu Roi" is surely Jarry's most widely known work, and it is an excellent and fun read indeed. However, this edition on New Directions is, unfortunately, badly done.

The translation here is by Barbara Wright, who's translations (of Jarry, Queneau, and others) I generally enjoy. I'm sure this one is equally good, but it is difficult to tell. The entire text of "Ubu Roi" is presented here in hand-written form (scribbled is more like it), with a pen the size of a sharpie. Add to that inane drawings (not Jarry's) around and behind the text on every page. Not only is this very distracting, but some words are not really legible. If you try hard enough you can read it, but it is a very tedious process and completely takes away the fun of reading "Ubu Roi".

With that said, there are a few additional texts in this volume that are printed normally, and which are worthwhile. First is Barbara Wright's useful introduction, and at the end are two essays on the theatre by Jarry, as well as his "Song of Disembraining". The two essays can be found in the Methuen edition, but the "Song..." I have not seen in any other easily available Jarry volume.

I'd highly recommend that any interested reader avoid this edition and pay a few more dollars for the Methuen edition. The translation there (by Connolly and Taylor) is excellent, includes the two subsequent Ubu plays, and features a lengthy introduction and larger selection of Jarry's essays on the theatre.

Not the greatest translation of Jarry's masterpiece.

As a Dover thrift edition, it is thrifty and cheap. . . you get what you pay for.

I would recommend the Cyril Connelly/Simon Watson Taylor version in it's place.

I've been rereading some of the classics of absurdist theater -Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, and this play, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Ubu the King. Reading Ubu again is like reading it new, so fresh and vivid its language and imagery is, so original a play it is, even now, 115 years after its first performance in Paris. A performance run that lasted two days, by the way -one night of dress rehearsal in front of an audience and one of full performance. The audiences at both performances were by all accounts unruly, and it's easy to see why when you read the play. Even by modern standards, it is unbelievably rude and deliberately offensive. But it is also extremely funny and, looking ahead to Dada and Artaud's Theatre of the Violent, definitely influential.

If there is a parallel to Jarry's scabrous play, it might be some of the musical works of Erik Satie, a contemporary of Jarry, who turned away from romantic ideals of composition to create musical fragments with whimsical titles -"Four Movements in the Shape of a Pear," "Sketches and Flirtations of an Overweight Bonhomme," "Flabby Preludes for a Dog." Both Jarry and Satie were early surrealists, but Jarry took the cake on offensiveness.

Oddly enough, that's one of the great pleasures of this play -its offensiveness, its deliberate and sustained air of vulgarity. Ubu is no play for the faint of heart. The playgoer who tolerate profanity because it is appropriate to the situation will find no excuse for profanity her, because Jarry uses it simply to epater le bourgeois (shock/cock a snook at the middle class). Thus, the repeated use of hardcore profanities that spot the pages of Ubu.

The center of the play is Ubu and the play tells of his run for the kingship of Poland. Why Poland? Because Poland didn't exist in Jarry's time. It hadn't for over a hundred years, ever since the respectable rulers of Europe had sliced and diced it into nonexistence in three successive partitions in the eighteenth century. Poland was Nowhere Land and thus fertile ground for Jarry's phantasmagoric imagination. And Ubu himself? He's vulgar -that's taken for granted--but also greedy, vain, cowardly, profane, no scabrous!, and treacherous. Let's see, have I left anything out? Oh, yes! He's also very very funny.

It took more than a generation before Ubu Roi gained champions. In the 1920s, the Dadaists and the Surrealists adopted it. In the 50s, it was resurrected again for presentation by Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's influential avant garde Living Theater. We saw Beck/Malina's theater in performance in the late sixties. The climax of the performance was an invitation to come on stage, where we were encouraged to take off our clothes and, if not that, pile onto a huge lump of other spectators so the cowards who had stayed in their seats in the theater could look at us. It was interesting how your perspective changed when you went on stage to play, not a character, but yourself, and yourself on display.

Ultimately, that's what theater like this was about: playing with language, meaning and values, and, behind that, exposing us to ourselves, in all our vulnerabilities and behind all our camouflages.

1991 22nd printing includes; Ubu Roi (drama in 5 acts); The Song of Disembraining;2 essays on theatre by Alfred Jarry-"Questions of the Theatre" and "Of the Futility of the "Theatrical" In the Theatre";2 portraits of the author by L. Lantier and F.A. Cazals, several drawings by Jarry and Pierre Bonnard and 204 drawings by Franciszka Themerson doodled on lithographic plates. Fascinating little book!

At $ 3.99 a copy you can't go wrong. I found this in the bargain bin at a local bookstore and thought I was in an absinthe delirium. The brilliant beginning of avant-garde theatre. Don't miss it.

1991 22nd printing includes; Ubu Roi, a Drama in 5 acts; The Song of Disembraining by Alfred Jarry; 2 essays on the theatre by Jarry - "Questions of the Theatre" and "Of the Futility of the "Theatrical" In the Theatre";2 portraits of author by L. Lantier and F. A. Cazals;several drawings by Jarry and Pierre Bonnard;204 drawings by Franciszka Themerson doodled on lithographic plates. Fascinating book!