From the Actor to Ubu: Jarry's Theatre of the Double

From the Actor to Ubu: Jarry's Theatre of the Double MICHAEL K. SPINGLER • MANY OF THE MAJOR INNOVATIONS of the modern avant-garde theatre depend upon the discovery that plays can share with dreams the capacity for dramatizing unconscious processes through archetypal images. Alfred Jarry is one of the first modern playwrights to have put this discovery into practice by attempting an anti-realistic theatre of irrational suggestion. His plays have been often mistaken for iconoclastic farces, but their effect does not depend primarily upon the mechanisms of farce. He says of Ubu Roi: "Really, there's no reason to expect a funny play, and the masks establish that the comedy should be, at the most, the macabre comedy of an English clown or of a dance of death."} The play is rather a violent dream play in which there is a grotesque distortion of the world. Jarry's theoretical writings reveal that he is calling for a theatre which is remarkably like Antonin Artaud's; a theatre which will actualize myths of the obscure regions of the mind. Jarry writes that he wanted Ubu Roi to be a sort of mirror in which "the depraved man sees himself with the horns of a bull and the body of a dragon, according to the exaggeration of his vices" (p. 153). This is the key to Jarry's innovations since it shows that they are more concerned with the character than with plot or dialogue. His dramaturgy deals specifically with the problem of how the actor embodies the character on the stage. Two vital relationships are involved: the first is the actor's function as an instrument for the expression of the playwright's idea; the second is the relation between the actor and the audience in which the performer is seen as a true reflection of the spectator. Jarry's intent was to break down the original substance of the actor and replace it by the image of a new stage creature. By distorting the human image of the actor, Jarry invented a character who would suggest to the audience aspects of themselves deeply hidden beneath the appearance of civilization and culture. The play reshapes the actor's living presence into a 1 2 MICHAEL K. SPINGLER concrete metaphor which reveals to the spectator his dark and primordial nature. Now, the specific object, or rather victim, of Jarry's innovations was the nineteenth-century Grand Actor who dominated the stage as if it were a fief and he its lord. In conjunction with the directeur or owner-manager, he determined the nature and quality of the dramatic performance, and, quite often, he sacrificed character and playas tribute to his own image. Stamping the boards to signal for applause from the claque during a soiree which might include selections from Phedre or Le Cid (but seldom the complete play), stars such as La Bernhardt or Coquelin made sure that the audience was more interested in their acting then in the character's suffering. Jarry believed that such an actor's personality created the greatest obstacle to a theatre which would be an integrated artistic whole: "We're not sure why, but we're always bored at what is called the Theatre. Could it be that we're aware that the actor, genius though he may be - and all the more so if he is genial, or personal - betrays the poet's thoughts?" (p. 495). For Jarry, the excessively personal actor was a rival who would interfere with the theatre the poet envisioned. Ubu is Jarry's answer to that rival. In one of his aspects he is certainly a parody of the greedy doyen who hogs center stage. As he says to his followers: "I'll stay in the middle like a living citadel and you others revolve around me" (p. 95). Indeed, the long speeches of both Ubu and his wife (his only serious competition for stealing the show) are parodies of the grand style of declamation. They stand out in comic contrast to the extremely abbreviated dialogue which establishes the play's basic rhythm. The object of the comic barb is quite clear when, at the end of...