About the work
König Ubu (Ubu Roi) is a five-act play by Alfred Jarry that grew out of a schoolboy caricature of his despised physics teacher M. Hébert, which Jarry and classmates developed in Rennes and which he later reworked alone into a full play. It premiered on 10 December 1896 at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris under Aurélien Lugné-Poe, and its opening word, 'Merdre!', already triggered a theatrical scandal.
Plot
The cowardly, greedy and megalomaniac Père Ubu, urged on by his wife Mère Ubu, murders the King of Poland and seizes power; as a tyrant he has the nobility and bourgeoisie plundered and executed, until he is finally overthrown by a coalition of the exiled king's son Bougrelas, Russia and rebellious nobles.
Cultural significance
With its grotesque language, cartoonish characters and mockery of bourgeois and courtly conventions, Ubu Roi is regarded as a forerunner of twentieth-century literary avant-gardes and is read as a precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd; Jarry later developed the material into his pseudo-science of 'Pataphysics'.