Alfred Jarry

A stunning, controversial work that immediately outraged audiences with its scatological references during the 1896 premiere, the farce satirizes the tendency of the successful bourgeois to abuse his authority and become irresponsibly complacent. Championed as the first absurdist drama, Ubu Roi features a main character that is cruel, gluttonous, and grotesque.

Drama Classics: the World's Great Plays at a Great little Price Alfred Jarry's trilogy of plays about the comically grotesque character of Pa Ubu, satirising power, greed, and bourgeois pretension. The Ubu Plays (King Ubu, Cuckold Ubu and Slave Ubu) caused scandal when they first appeared in Paris in the 1890s, with their surreal and frequently obscene energy, and their broad parodies of Shakespeare. They have since acquired cult status in European drama, and are seen by some as harbingers of modernism. In King Ubu (Ubu roi, first performed in Paris in 1896), Pa Ubu is a cowardly hanger-on at the court of Good King Wenceslas of Baloney. Nagged by his fearsome wife Ma Ubu, he gathers a band of Barmpots and seizes the throne. But Ubu soon turns into a tyrant, debraining anyone who disagrees with him, murdering all the aristocrats and middle classes and extorting triple taxes from the peasants. When Ma Ubu runs off with a handsome soldier, his downfall suddenly seems inevitable... Cuckold Ubu (Ubu cocu) is the darkest and most surreal of the plays. Pa Ubu takes up residence in the home of Peardrop, a breeder of polyhedra, and he and his Barmpots tyrannise the neighbourhood, despite the efforts of Pa Ubu's Conscience and Peardrop to stop them. In Slave Ubu (Ubu encha?né) Pa Ubu decides that he has had enough of tyranny, and that the only way to be free is to become a slave, with unpredictable results. Also included is the short sketch Up Ubu (Ubu sur la butte), comprising scenes and sequences from Ubu roi, with added songs. This volume of The Ubu Plays, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, contains fresh and performable English translations by Kenneth McLeish, as well as an introduction to the plays and a chronology of Jarry's life.

The singular novel by the legendary author of the play, UBU ROI, is a book that can only be compared to Rabelais or Sterne. FAUSTROLL recounts the adventures of the inventor of PATAPHYSIC, the 'science of imaginary solutions.' Jarry would have found an audience more readily if he had simply written a work of science fiction, a symbolist narrative, a bawdy tale or a spriritual allegory. As it is, FAUSTROLL is all of these at the same time.' - Roger Shattuk'

A re-issue of three plays that ushered in the great age of absurdist theatre There was a riot at the first performance of Ubu Roi on 10 December 1896, when Firmin Gemier, playing Ubu, strode to the footlights and roared: "Merde!" at the audience, and theatre would never be the same again. Ubu became a force to be reckoned with in literature, art and politics. Jarry wrote more exploits for him and took to acting the role of Ubu himself in his own brief, strange life. This volume contains lively modern translations by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor of Ubu Roi, Ubu Cocu and Ubu Enchaine as well as Jarry's writings on theatre." The Ubu explosion sent shrapnel flying into the next century. Dada, Surrealism, Pataphysics, Theatre of Cruelty, the Absurd - all owe a debt to Jarry." (Charles Marowitz, Encore)

One of the most extraordinary events of the late nineteenth century in Paris was the opening on December 11, 1896, at the Th tre de l'Oeuvre, of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi. The audience was scandalized by this revolutionary satire, developed from a schoolboy farce, which began with a four-letter word, defied all the traditions of the stage, and ridiculed the established values of bourgeois society. Barbara Wright's witty translation of this riotous work is accompanied with drawings by Franciszka Themerson. Two previously untranslated essays in which Jarry explains his theories of the drama have also been included.