Opening night, 1896

From a MilkMag detailed story on Ubu's creator and the notorious opening-night (and preview-night) responses to the play:

On the evening of [December] 9th, [1896], friends, intellectuals, and fellow supporters gathered to see what sort of monstrosity Jarry had created. Many of them had already read the play [...]. What was a little unnerving though was Jarry's curtain speech. Rachilde had tried to talk him out of this, but he insisted following the fashion of the day. In front of the curtain a table was placed. Jarry appeared and walked over to it like an android. He was dressed in a "baggy black suit" and his hair was "plastered down like Bonaparte." Beaumont describes him as looking like a "circus clown in a white shirt with a huge starched front and an enormous bow-tie" and his face white from fear. The speech was "delivered in the clipped tones of Ubu." Jarry thanked many of the critics in the audience and followed with what I believe to be quintessential pataphysics.

[...] He then made a number of apologies as to the final state of the production. He claimed there was not enough time for rehearsal, and that this had resulted in certain cuts to the script―including "several passages indispensable to the meaning and equilibrium of the play.". He also admitted that "he and his celebrated scene painters (which included Toulouse-Lautrec, Sérusier, and Bonnard) had been 'up all night' painting last minute props" and that the grand orchestra had to be reduced to a piano and a drum. He ended by saying, "as to the action that is about to begin, it takes place in Poland―that is to say, nowhere." He bowed awkwardly and left.

In front of a restless audience, Ma and Pa Ubu took to the stage. Playing the title role was the "magnificent actor Fermin Gémier, on loan from the Comédie Francaise." Most accounts claim a riot began as soon as Gémier spoke the first word of the play. This is not true of the général. The performance actually went along without any real interruption until Act III, Scene 5. The scene involved the newly crowned King Ubu visiting his former friend Bordure at the Thorn prison. "Here in place of the door of the prison cell, an actor stood with one arm outstretched; Gérmier 'inserted' a key into his hand, made a clicking noise, and turned the arm as if opening a door." "At that moment, the audience, doubtless finding that the joke had gone on long enough, began to shout and storm.". Everything halted, until a furious Gérmier hit upon the idea of dancing a jig. "The audience broke into laughter, and the performance was able to continue, although further periodic interruptions occurred until the end."

The premiere, the following evening, was a different matter indeed. In attendance were "all the leading in the worlds of politics, journalism and letters." Grémier once again spoke the opening 'Merdre!' ('Shite'). The audience immediately burst out with a roar. Grémier was "unable to get a word in edgewise for the next fifteen minutes." It was the first time that someone had spoken such a word on the modern stage. Gémier tried to silence the audience by blowing a tramway horn. Many people left the theatre. A fight broke out in the orchestra pit, while Jarry's supporters yelled, "You wouldn't have understood Shakespeare or Wagner either!" Others shouted, "Can't you see that the author is taking us for a bunch of damned fools?" When Grémier had finally gotten slight control of the audience, he spoke the second word―another 'Merdre!' Needless to say, the audience started to howl once more. They shouted at the stage and at each other. When things quieted down again, the play proceeded as planned. Smaller outbursts continued throughout the performance. In the days that followed, the violent battle for and against Ubu Roi would move on into the Parisian press.

Long live Pere Ubu!

(Note! That's not our set!)

Like a lot of people my age--easing from high school to college as Pistols-era punk rock evolved into post-punk--I first became aware of Ubu Roi through the legendary avant-noise rock of Pere Ubu. The band is still around, more than 30 years later, albeit with an ever-changing lineup, and it's kinda surprising that it took them until 2008 to get around to actually staging Jarry's play.

The production, described here, sounds pretty interesting--and quite far from our own handling of the same material. Visual elements are by the Brothers Quay, and lead singer/songwriter/play adapter David Thomas performs as Pa Ubu himself--the role he was obviously born to play. Here's a sample:



(You can download a free MP3 of the same song here, or buy the whole album shortly.)

Thoughts after watching Herzog's Woyzeck

Several of us, mostly from the Ubu cast, watched Werner Herzog's 1979 adaptation of Woyzeck the other day. I'd seen it around the time it came out, but remembered almost nothing about it (other than being disappointed by comparison to Herzog's earlier movies). This second viewing, informed by reading Büchner's script and living with our evolving version of it for a couple of years, made a lot more sense to me. Here's a bit of what went through my mind, and I hope others will join in.

1. For the first time, i really grasped the implications of Sarah's point about the fragmentary/unfinished nature of the original. There's no definitive version of the play, and different translators/directors have fiddled around with it in all sorts of ways. (In some of our earliest discussions of what we might do with it, we briefly toyed with the idea of drawing scenes out of a hat and performing them in totally random order.) Sure enough, Herzog's adaptation includes almost everything ours does, only in a markedly different sequence, plus an additional scene at the end. The effect reminded me of the time I provided text material for a dance piece by three friends--I gave them lots of fragments and told them to take what they wanted and then do anything with it they wanted. When I saw the actual performance, i recognized almost all the words coming out of their mouths, but had no idea what they'd say next or how it would sound. Likewise, everything Woyzeck and company did and said was familiar, yet not.

2. The downside of this arbitrariness is that there's no real character development in the story. Woyzeck (the character) starts off pretty crazy, stays that way as he undergoes various trials and tribulations, and just gets a little crazier at the end. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like there's no single incident that pushes him over the edge--he's already over it from the get-go. I think that has a lot to do with why I didn't remember much about the movie, and why the printed script of the play (minus our, or anyone else's, staging of it) feels a little slight to me.

3. I get the sensation, particularly watching Herzog's filmed version, that the play is from a totally different era and culture than ours. Well, that's obvious, of course, but what I mean is that few of the conventions we as audience members 150 years later take for granted--Method acting, narrative arc, even cause and effect--apply here, at least not in recognizable form.

This is not to suggest I don't find Woyzeck interesting--far from it! In fact, I'm eager to see what other adapters have done with Büchner's raw material, including Berg's opera and the several other film versions.

Here's the trailer for the Herzog movie: