Past Productions: “Merdre!” Most Foul: Scatology on Stage

With the coyly misspelled battle cry “Merdre!” (variously translated as “Shite!”, “Pschitt!” or “Shittr!”), Alfred Jarry set off a riot in the audience of the first public performance of Ubu Roi in 1896. He also ushered in a new era of scatology on stage. Although both the comic potential of excrement and its association with human degradation had been understood for centuries, Jarry united the two in a way which sent shock waves through his time and into our own.

Scatological references on stage began with comedy itself. Aristophanes, writing near the end of the fifth century b.c., was quick to use bodily functions for satirical purposes. In one episode from The Clouds, he — or, more accurately, a lizard — takes a pot shot at the philosopher Socrates:

Student: And yet last night a mighty thought we lost Through a green lizard.

Strepsiades: Tell me, how was that?

Student: Why, as Himself [Socrates], with eyes and mouth wide open, Mused on the moon, her paths and revolutions, A lizard from the roof squirted full on him.

Strepsiades: He, he, he, he. I like the lizard’s spattering Socrates.

Strepsiades was not alone in his giggling. Classical comedy — both Greek and Roman — is similarly spattered with scatological references.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, scatology resurged right along with theater. Even medieval mystery plays — dramatic representations of Bible stories — incorporated some of the coarser elements of human existence. In The Second Shepherd’s Play, which has the Nativity as its primary subject, a would-be thief speaks condescendingly to a group of shepherds, and is told by one of them to take his affected accent “and set it in a turd.” In this play, the crude scatological humor of the shepherds contrasts sharply with the divine visitation which follows, widening the gulf between heaven and earthiness.

While excremental humor on stage continued unabated through the Renaissance, scatology took a more serious turn in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, which showed the usurped king imprisoned in a sewer-like dungeon. Here, Edward’s foul surroundings are tragic rather than satirical; they are a physical exhibition of his fallen fortunes. Even Shakespeare was not above wallowing in the mire, though unlike Marlowe he usually reserved scatology for humorous purposes. Shakespeare’s usurped king, Richard II, is not subjected to excremental indignities, but his comic King of Misrule, Falstaff, is re-introduced to us in Henry IV, part 2, discussing his “waters.”

In the eighteenth century, sex superseded scatology as the subject of comedy on stage. Although Jonathan Swift set new scatological standards in poetry and prose, dramatists were more inspired to write comedies about lust and/or love. By the nineteenth century, even this subject had been tamed in the mainstream theater. At the boulevard theatres of France, farce and well-mannered, well-made plays ruled the stage. In 1896, after decades of polite plots, the “Merdre!” of Ubu Roi was all the more explosive.

Not content with this opening offensive, not even content with Pere and Mere Ubu’s guerre de merdre, Jarry put “pschitt” on stage via a toilet brush (some demure translations call it “an unmentionable brush”), which Pere Ubu brings in as one of the courses at a banquet. The scene hits a new level of tastelessness as the guests in fact taste the brush and are poisoned. Jarry’s ground-breaking use of scatology was not only shocking; it also linked satirical qualities of scatology to animalism, degradation, and violence.

Although in the century since the premiere of Ubu Roi the word “shittr,” even spelled correctly, has lost much of its shock value, Jarry’s scatological link between the satire and violence continues to have impact on audiences. While Jarry could shock through both word and deed, recent playwrights have relied on more explicit ways than language, or even toilet brushes, to put scatology on stage. In The Road to Nirvana (1989), for example, Arthur Kopit includes a scene in which one character is compelled to literally “eat shit” in order to participate in a lucrative movie deal (a direct parody of more figurative degradation in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow). While such plays deal with greed and corruption in the 1980s, the upcoming Ubu Rock will take on the ’90s. And, with the spirit of Jarry’s violently comic scatological satire, it will surely get away with “merdre.”

Heather Lindsley is a dramaturgy graduate of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.