Address Prefatory to the opening of Ubu Roi,
and the riots which followed – December 10, 1896
Alfred Jarry
Ladies and Gentlemen, it would be superfluous, aside from a certain absurdity in an author's speaking of his own play, for me to come here and preface with a few words this presentation of Ubu Roi, after such famous critics have cared to discuss it — among whom I must thank, and with these few all the others, M.M. Silvestre, Mendès, Scholl, Lorrain and Bauer —, if I did not feel that their benevolence had found Ubu's belly big with more satirical symbols than we can possibly pump up tonight. The Swedenborgian philosopher Mésès has excellently compared rudimentary creations with the most perfect, and embryonic beings with the most complete, in that the former lack all irregularities, protuberances and qualities, which leaves them in more or less spherical form, like the ovum and M. Ubu, while the latter have added so many personal details that they remain equally spherical, following the axiom that the most polished object is that which presents the greatest number of sharp corners. That is why you are free to see in M. Ubu however many allusions you care to, or else a simple puppet — a schoolboy's caricature of one of his professors who personified for him all the ugliness in the world. It is this aspect that the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre will present tonight. Our actors have been willing to depersonalise themselves for two evenings, and to act behind masks, in order to express more perfectly the inner man, the soul of these overgrown puppets you are about to see. The play having been put on prematurely, and with more enthusiasm than anything else, Ubu hasn't had time to get his real mask (which is very inconvenient to wear anyway), and the other characters will be fitted out, like him, somewhat approximately. It seemed very important if we were to be quite like puppets — Ubu Roi is a play that was never written for puppets, but for actors pretending to be puppets, which is not the same thing — for us to have carnival music, and the orchestral parts have been allotted to various brasses, gongs and speaking-trumpet horns that we haven't had time to collect. We don't hold it too much against the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. Mainly we wanted to see Ubu incarnate in the versatile talent of M. Gémier, and tonight and tomorrow night are the only two performances that M. Ginisty and his production of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam have been free to relinquish to us. We will proceed with the three acts that have been rehearsed, and two that have been rehearsed with certain cuts. I have made all the cuts the actors wanted, even cutting several passages indispensible to the meaning and equilibrium of the play, while leaving in at their request certain scenes I would have been glad to cut; for, however much we'd like to be marionettes, we haven't hung all out actors on strings, which, even if it weren't absurd, would have complicated things badly. In the same way, we haven't been too literal about our crowd scenes, whereas in a puppet-show a handful of strings and pulleys will serve to command a whole army. You must expect to see important personages like M. Ubu and the Czar forced to gallop neck-and-neck on cardboard horses that we've spent the night painting in order to supply the action. The first three acts, at least, and the final scenes, will be played complete, as they were written. Our stage setting is very appropriate, because, even though it's an easy trick to lay your scene in eternity, and, for instance, to have someone shoot off a revolver in the year one-thousand-and-such, here you must accept doors that open out on plains covered with snow falling from a clear sky, chimneys adorned with clocks splitting to serve as doors, and palm-trees growing at the foot of bedsteads for little elephants sitting on shelves to munch on. As to our orchestra that isn't here, we'll miss only its brilliance and tone. The themes for Ubu will be performed offstage by various pianos and drums. As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland -- that is to say, nowhere.
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