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Essay on A History of Ubu Roi
When Ubu Roi premiered in 1896 it caused a riot and the play was closed down after only one performance. Today, the play might not seem so shocking, but in Jarry’s Paris it was seen as scandalous. Theatre was viewed almost exclusively as entertainment for the upper- and middle classes. On the whole, plays were conventional affairs, aiming to please rather than to challenge. The dominating new trend was realism – not exactly a genre that Ubu Roi fell into. The climate was anything but receptive to the kind of experimentation Jarry was attempting.
The mainstream theatre existed largely as a source of after-dinner light entertainment for the Parisian bourgeoisie, who went to socialise and enjoy an evening of ‘well-made’ drama. Normally, a play would not be considered successful unless it was given at least 100 performances, and most plays were expected to run for about 300. Consequently, theatre managers were keen to produce work which they were convinced would be popular, and the margin for experimental theatre was very small indeed. The most dominant figure in the late 19thCentury was the hugely successful playwright Eugène Scribe, who was the inventor of the original ‘well-made’ play. In 1836 Scribe famously described the theatre as ‘a place for relaxation and amusement, not for instruction or correction’, and this sentiment was widely accepted throughout the 19th Century.
As a reaction against this style of light entertainment, French theatre of the late 19th Century began to display a strong tendency towards realism. As early as the 1850s, directors had begun to replicate real rooms on stage to create an illusion of reality, and a corresponding acting style soon developed. Actors began to smoke on stage, to knit, eat, even perform seemingly ‘real’ blood transfusions, as in a famous 1890 productionThe plays of Alfred Jarry are considered by many to be the first dramatic works of the theatre of the absurd......
