If Gogol showed us corruption, and Beckett showed us despair, then Alfred Jarry — bizarre, bicycle-riding prophet of the avant-garde — showed us what happens when civilisation finally gives up pretending to be civil. Ubu Roi isn’t a play; it’s a cultural detonation, a theatrical act of vandalism so gleefully grotesque that even today it feels less like reading a script and more like being slapped with a custard pie filled with gunpowder.
The curtain rises.
The first word spoken is ‘Merdre!’ — a French mutation of ‘merde,’ meaning… well, you can imagine.
The audience of 1896 gasped, hissed, shouted, and then punched one another.
And thus, modern absurdism was born.
At the centre of the carnage is Père Ubu: greedy, cowardly, murderous, gluttonous, flatulent, selfish, tyrannical, childish, and somehow still recognisably human — a grotesque caricature of every petty dictator who ever waddled through history, clutching a scepter in one hand and his own swollen belly with the other.
Ubu is a king not because he’s noble, but because he kills the noble.
He’s powerful not because he’s strong, but because no one else dares object to his stupidity.
He’s monstrous because his monstrousness is permitted.
In this way, Jarry saw something most of us learn only after decades of observing the world: you don’t need intelligence to rule; you need appetite. And Ubu’s appetite — for food, money, power, slaughter — is infinite. He’s the embodiment of id without superego, a bloated echo of Macbeth rewritten by a lunatic who thinks murder is simply another household chore.
Where Beckett’s tramps wait for a saviour who never comes, Jarry’s world is what happens when that saviour finally arrives — and turns out to be a deranged, drooling tyrant with the moral sophistication of a spoiled five-year-old.
And yet, amidst the farce, there’s truth.
Ubu is funny because he’s familiar.
His delusions are our politicians’ delusions;
his vanity our celebrities’;
his cowardice our institutions’.
Humanity often tries to be noble, but far more often it tries to get away with something.
Jarry called the play a ‘tragic farce,’ and that duality is its genius.
You laugh, because how could you not?
But you also wince, because beneath the slapstick lies the uncomfortable revelation that civilisation is a thin crust of manners floating on a swamp of appetite.
If Waiting for Godot dismantles the meaning of existence, Ubu Roi dismantles the dignity of it.
Where one’s philosophical silence, the other’s philosophical flatulence.
Together, they form the bookends of modern absurdity.
And perhaps that’s why Ubu Roi still feels so startlingly modern: we’ve not evolved beyond this grotesque creature.
If anything, he’s grown stronger — louder, fatter, greedier, and more convinced of his right to reign.
Père Ubu is not dead.
He’s on Instagram.
He’s in Parliament.
He’s buying another yacht.
Every age gets the Ubu it deserves.
And ours, God help us, has earned a whole brood of them.
Wording 