Afterword

Abstract

Alfred Jarry did for modern theatre what half a century after him the nouveaux romanciers were to do for the novel: he inaugurated the era of suspicion.¹ A century afterwards, we can still trace our lineage back to the revolution brought about by the staging of the most trivial, the most inept masterpiece ever written. Yes, Ubu roi is an empty work, devoid of grandeur and great ideas, and yet it is a masterpiece: it relocates the notion of play — serious play, involving life and death — at the heart of the theatrical event. Moreover, at the dawn of the twentieth century Ubu roi launched a mythical figure who proved to be prophetic. We might say that each century gets the ‘heroes’ it deserves: antiquity bequeathed CEdipus and Prometheus to us, the Renaissance gave us Faust and Hamlet, the seventeenth century Macbeth and Don Juan. Figaro dominates the eighteenth century; the anti-hero (Woyzeck) and the courtesan (Marguerite Gautier) haunt the nineteenth century; but it is the ignoble Ubu whose genocidal shadow darkens our own century.