Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire by Claude Schumacher (review)

430 Book Reviews "more like a novel than a play," The Madras House "curiously untheatrical." and Waste "surprisingly pedestrian." If this is the conventional wisdom it sits oddly with the effect these works have had upon recent critics and audiences. The RSC's 1985 revival of Waste played to packed houses at the Barbican for two months before transferring to the Lyric for a successful conunercial run - a singularly unpedestrian fate. Over the past decade great strides have been made in our understanding of the early modem theatre by focussing upon its acting styles, production techniques, and social organizalion. Perhaps the next leap forward will come from a more sympathetic reading of its plays. JOEL H. KAPLAN, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA CLAUDE SCHUMACHER. Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire. London: Macmillan, 1984. Pp. 201, illustrated. £4.95 (PB). Claude Schumacher's study, Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, provides a clear, useful introduction to two playwrights who had a great influence on the development of modem French theater. Schumacher, editor of Theatre Research International and a teacher of Drama at the University ofGlasgow, gives an incisive analysis of the seminal plays of these dramatists - Jarry's Vbu roj and Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tjresias. Beginning with a Chapter on French society and theater in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Schumacher recounts the life in France following the collapse of Napoleon Ill's regime and the establishment of the Third Republic, portraying the period not as a time of innocence and peace but as a moment in which the working class lived under miserable and intolerable conditions. The major portion of the chapter is devoted to the prominent dramatists ofthe second part ofthe century - Dumas fils, Henri "Becque, Maurice Maeterlinck - and the important melleUrS-erl-scene, Andre Antoine and the Theatre Libre and Lugne-Poe and the Theatre de l' Oeuvre. The main part of Schumacher's study deals with Alfred Jarry and Vbu roj. Jarry attended the lycee in Rennes, where a certain Monsieur Hebert, an incompetent professor ofphysics, was the basis for the celebrated Ubu character that the students had created over the years. larry left Rennes with his mother in 1891 (not 1881 as erroneously printed, p. 2 r) for Paris where he entered into the literary and artistic life of the city. In 1896, Jarry's version ofthe students' laIc, Ubu roi, was fIrst presented on stage by Lugne-Poe with Firmin Gemier in the title role. This riotous opening (followed by only one more performance) established larry's reputation in the theater. In addition, the playwright himself began to take on the outlandish speech and dress patterns associated with Pere Ubu. The dramatist continued writing but had difficulty finding publishers and he experienced a physical decline that led to his early death at the age of thirty-four in 1907 of tubercular meningitis. Schumacher's analysis of Vbu roi deals with the transformation of the character whom he calls "Pa Ubu" - from the tonnented, pathetic teacher into an example ofall of humanity's baser instincts and negative qualities: greed, cruelty, stupidity, gluttony, Book Reviews 431 selfishness. He also explains how Jarry defied the dramatic conventions of his day and contends that the playwright reinvented primitive an in his rejection of naturalistic exactitude and symbolistic haziness. Schumacher's discussion of the contrast between Ubu roi and Macbeth is particularly interesting, as he points out that Macbeth has all the ambition ofan outstanding warrior, whereas Ubu is a smug bourgeois and a self·satisfied boor. The opening night of Ubu roi was an auspicious bcginining for the young, rebellious writer, but the following plays oflarry treating the Ubu legend were much less successful. In a chapter dealing with Jarry's theatrical ideas, Schumacher notes, with considerable insight, that larry was not really a man of the theater, although be possessed a theatrical instinct of a highly individual kind. Nor was he, a priori, a theatrical reformer, He broke with naturalist theatrical conventions because such conventions could not possibly serve his personal vision. Nevertheless, his ideas on the theater have their own special validity and have become more influential as the twentieth century has progressed. Schumacher states provocatively...