 |
The
Language of Abuse
Program note for Adrian Guthrie's 1991 production of Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry at University of Western Sydney Macarthur |
At its premiere performance the first line of Ubu Roi caused a riot. Some of the audience rose to denounce the play others to defend it, and their shouted insults led to an all-out brawl. Such language of abuse was less familiar on stage in 1897 than it has become now that swearing has become something of a commonplace of realism.
Yet in the provocations it sets out, Ubu Roi is one of the great landmarks of the modern stage tradition, and not refraining from swearing was far from the only rule its author set out to break. Jarry’s transgressions of the conventions of the nineteenth century stage opened up new territory that came to be occupied by modernism in the theatre of the twentieth century.
In the 1930s the visionary poet Antonin Artaud established his own theatre project in Paris, which he called after the author of Ubu: The Alfred Jarry Theatre. In this period Artaud proposed a theatre of cruelty in which the raw vitality of the theatrical performance would assault the audience with an immediacy that might put to rest the artifice of the conventional European stage tradition. Artaud adopted Jarry’s strategies and oppositional stance to the dominant conventions of naturalistic representation. This approach has become a ubiquitous means of art making in the twentieth century.
Symptomatic of the complexity of the postmodern period is the irony that we cannot now avoid speaking of the tradition of the anti-traditionalists. Even the coercive nature of the historical avant-gardes has been appropriated and institutionalised in the ever-changing fabric of industrial capitalism.
In Ubu Roi we still find pleasure/displeasure in the upending of the social order. We watch, balanced between amusement and dismay, the infantile gratification of Pere Ubu and his monstrous wife, and the unremitting depictions of Pere Ubu’s bullying sadism. The play is chilling in the way it prefigures the monsters of the twentieth century – Haig, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill – for whom Europe was a kind of board-game, and the peoples of Europe mere pieces with which to win or lose territory. The theatre of cruelty may well be seen as an emblem of the twentieth century.
- Adrian Guthrie 1991
 |
|
