Ubu’s Moment: Four Resurrected Histories of the 1896 Parisian Premiere of Ubu Roi

Abstract

Ubu’s Moment: Four Resurrected Histories of the 1896 Parisian Premiere of Ubu Roi, is a new account of the début Parisian production of the nineteenth-century French writer Alfred Jarry’s best known play, Ubu Roi. The term “resurrected” features in the title because, in this study, four previously neglected historical perspectives on this critical moment of the modernist theatrical past are brought back to life. Their first purpose is to reopen forgotten contemporary contexts concerning the production. More importantly, though, these resurrections aspire to displace and replace the charismatic myth (of a rioting and morally-outraged bourgeois audience) which continues to dominate and distort the general understanding of this noteworthy theatre historical occasion.For many readers of theatre history the fictional idea of a rioting bourgeois audience at Ubu Roi has proved so emotionally satisfying that other, more trustworthy, un-fictional accounts of the historical production, having less entertainment value, are dismissed and forgotten . . . and so the myth endures. Therefore, to illuminate the more truthful workings of the historical avant-garde theatre in an effective manner, some way must be found to supplant this beloved and seemingly indestructible morality tale. Toward this end, this dissertation takes a re-historiographic approach that has not been previously applied to this event. Each chapter of this work presents the reader with a different vision of the premiere of Ubu Roi. Each new telling features the viewpoint of a different significant player in the historicity of the occasion. These are, namely: Alfred Jarry (the play’s author); André Antoine (a celebrity member of the audience); Rachilde (pseudonym for Marguerite Eymery Vallette, editor of an important Parisian literary journal); and Henry Bauër (an influential theatre critic). All four perspectives offered in this study are equally true and archivally supported, yet they are also contradictory to one another. When combined, they create a new narrative collage-portrait of the tumultuous event: a multi-perspective composition pieced together from little-known but provable truths about the production, providing different and unfamiliar explanations of how the performance happened, what happened during it, and its overall significance. Ultimately, in place of re-inscribing a familiar but erroneous account of the play as a scandalizing assault on a bourgeois audience, this study proposes that the famously tumultuous premiere should, instead, be celebrated as an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) mystery. The occasion’s historical significance resides in the fact that several invested eyewitnesses all vied for historiographic “custody” of its premiere performance. They competed with one another for the right to declare and to define the meaning of that event for posterity — to become the predominant interpreter of the occasion — and, by becoming this, to use the impact of the performance to steer the direction and development of theatrical “progress” according to their own different agendas. This study argues that that contest — the custody battle — is what ought to be remembered about Ubu Roi, rather than the myth of an outraged bourgeois audience.