An Irishman’s Diary about Alfred Jarry, ‘Ubi Roi’ and JM Synge

One this date 120 years ago, a play called Ubu Roi opened and closed on the same night in Paris. Written by a 23-year-old Alfred Jarry, it was a comic mixture of Macbeth, Hamlet, and a schoolboy satire on Jarry's old physics teacher, whose surname (Hébert) the King Ubu of the title echoed.

The monarch’s sceptre was a toilet brush and his opening word was merdre. This was the signal for an audience uproar, at least some of which had been prearranged. The play then proceeded against the backdrop – or foredrop – of two factions abusing each other.

WB Yeats, who happened to be among them, joined in, echoing the more “spirited” hecklers, who were pro-Jarry. Afterwards, he recognised the event as a theatrical revolution. But he was also somewhat disturbed by its riotous comedy and, foreshadowing his rough-beast image of later years, saw in it the rise of a “Savage God”.

December 1896 proved a pivotal month in Irish literature because, while in Paris, Yeats also met JM Synge for the first time. “Poor Johnnie,” as Synge’s mother called him in a letter, had exiled himself in the city to “study socialism and [...] do good”. Yeats noticed he was very poor and lonely, but also predicted that Synge could be central to an artistic revolution back home. For now, he urged the younger man to go west – to the Aran Islands – in search of a theme.

Synge does not appear to have attended that infamous opening night but he must have known of Jarry, who lived nearby in the 6th arrondissement and was a very visible figure around town.

One of Jarry’s Paris addresses was number 7 Rue Cassette, on what he called the “second-and-a-half floor”. It wasn’t a mezzanine, exactly. It was the result of a greedy landlord subdividing flats on the horizontal rather than vertical plane, so that even though Jarry was of diminutive stature, he could barely stand up in his room

This seems to have been in keeping with his eccentric lifestyle. He shared another of his flats with live owls, had a relationship of Flann O’Brienesque intensity with his bicycle, and more worryingly – although most friends indulged it as one of his charming idiosyncasies – was wont to carry a loaded revolver and wave it around a lot.

Despite Ubu Roi’s short run, Jarry developed the character in two further plays. He also wrote novels, one of which was about a superhuman cyclist, fuelled by alcohol. Although a fantasy, this was doubly autobiographical, because Jarry was a prodigious drinker, often downing two bottles of wine even before an absinthe-soaked lunch, and repeating the dosage later in the day.

For different reasons, his lifespan and Synge’s were a close parallel, neither man living to be 40. Probably doomed anyway from tuberculosis, Jarry spent years drinking himself to death and completed the feat at 34.

He had done enough by then, however, to be considered a forerunner of such 20th-century artistic movements as Dadaism and surrealism. His enthusiasm for speed and machines made him a hero to the Futurists too.  His many friends had included Picasso who, after Jarry’s death, bought the revolver.

In its satire on power, Ubu Roi set the tone for an era or at least caught the mood. A year earlier, as Roy Foster mentions in his book on Ireland's revolutionary generation, Vivid Faces, a precocious teenager called James Joyce had seen the German play Heimat in Dublin. Explaining to his parents that it was about the overthrow of an older generation, he told them they needn't worry about having missed it, "It is going to happen in your own house".

Oedipal dramas were a keynote of the period leading up to 1916 in Ireland.  Yeats thought about staging a version of the original King Oedipus by Sophocles, but didn't get around to it until the 1920s. In the meantime his protege Synge had returned from the Arans with a play in which the protagonist thinks he has killed his father, but in any event supplants him.

It opened in January 1907, the year Jarry died. And although it had none of the scatological humour of Ubu Roi, it earned a similar reaction. The trigger is this case was a mention of women’s undergarments. But the moment had an echo of Jarry’s opening fusillade, as related in Lady Gregory’s famous telegram to Yeats: “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift”.