Past Productions: First Night, or Ubu Unleashed

Excerpt from The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck

December 11, 1896, the opening night, is worth describing in detail. There had been nothing like it since the wild premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830, when Theophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval carried the day for romanticism by highly organized demonstrations.

Before the curtain went up, a crude table was brought out, covered with a piece of old sacking. Jarry appeared, looking dead white, for he had made himself up like a streetwalker to face the footlights. Nervously sipping a glass of water, he spoke in his flattest, most clipped tones. For ten minutes, he sat in front of the explosive crowd, thanking the people who had helped in the production, referring briefly to the to the traditions of the Guignol theater, and mentioning the masks the actors would wear and the fact that the first three acts would be performed without intermission. He concluded in a more properly Ubuesque vein.

“In any case we have a perfect decor, for just as one good way of setting a play in Eternity is to have revolvers shot off in the year 1000, you will see doors open on fields of snow under blue skies, fireplaces furnished with clocks and swinging wide to serve as doors, and palm trees growing at the foot of a bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them. . . . As to the orchestra, there is none. Only its volume and timbre will be missed, for various pianos and percussion will execute Ubuesque themes from backstage. The action, which is about to begin, takes place in Poland, that is to say: Nowhere.”

In these earnest nonsense lines Jarry was already insinuating that the play is more than it appears, that the true setting of farce is (like Poland, a country long condemned to the nonexistence of partition) an Eternity of Nowhere, and that contradiction is the mode of its logic. The speech did not exactly ensure a sympathetic reception.

Jarry vanished with his table; the curtain went up on the set — the handiwork of Jarry himself, aided by Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Serusier. Like every other feature of this performance, the set had been described countless times. Arthur Symons, one of the few Englishmen present at this “symbolist farce,” as he calls it, recalled every detail.

” . . . the scenery was painted to represent, by a child’s conventions, indoors and out of doors, and even the torrid, temperate, and arctic zones at once. Opposite you, at the back of the stage, you saw apple trees in bloom, under a blue sky, and against the sky a small closed window and a fireplace . . . through the very midst of which . . . trooped in and out the clamorous and sanguinary persons of the drama. On the left was painted a bed, and at the foot of the bed a bare tree and snow falling. On the right there were palm trees . . . a door opened against the sky, and beside the door a skeleton dangled. A venerable gentleman in evening dress . . . trotted across the stage on the points of his toes between every scene and hung the newplacard on its nail.” (Studies in Seven Arts)

Gemier, swollen and commanding in his pear-shaped costume (but without a mask, despite Jarry’s campaign), stepped forward to speak the opening line — a single word. He had not known how to interpret the role until Lugne-Poe had suggested he imitate the author’s own voice and jerky stylized gestures. The midget Jarry truly sired the monster Ubu. In a voice like a hammer, Gemier pronounced an obscenity which Jarry had appropriated to himself by adding one letter.

“Merdre,” Gemier said. “Shite.”

It was fifteen minutes before the house could be silenced. The mot de Cambronne had done its work; the house was pandemonium. Those who had been lulled by Jarry’s opening speech were shocked awake; several people walked out without hearing any more. The rest separated into two camps of desperately clapping enthusiasts and whistling scoffers. Fist fights started in the orchestra. The critics were on the spot, their reactions observed by both sides. Edmond Rostand smiled indulgently; Henry Fouquier and Sarcey, representing the old guard, almost jumped out of their seats. A few demonstrators simultaneously clapped and whistled in divided sentiments. Mallarme sat quiet, waiting to see more of the “prodigious personage” to whose author he addressed a letter the following day. Jarry’s supporters shouted, “You wouldn’t understand Shakespeare either.” Their opponents replied with variations on the mot of the evening. Fernand Herold in the wings startled the audience into silence for a moment by turning up the house lights and catching people with their fists raised standing on their seats. The actors waited patiently, beginning to believe that the roles had been reversed and they had come to watch a performance out front.

Finally, Gemier improvised a jig and sprawled out on the prompter’s box. His diversion restored enough order to allow the action to proceed to the next “merdre,” when the audience took over once more. The interruptions continued for the rest of the evening, while Pere Ubu murdered his way to the throne of Poland, pillaged the country, was defeated by the king’s son aided by the czar’s army, and fled cravenly to France, where he promised to perpetrate further enormities on the population. The story of Ubu Roi is no more than this. Pere Ubu and Mere Ubu use language more scatological than erotic, and Rachilde maintains that the audience whistled because they “expected this Punch and Judy of an Ubu to function sexually” and were disappointed. The curtain rang down that night and the next on the only two performances of Ubu Roi until it was revived by Gemier in 1908. For the Theatre de l’Oeuvre it was the catastrophe that made it famous.