The Theatre of Ubu the King at the Reading Club
At the last meeting of the Reading Club at the Museu Picasso we got to grips with the play Ubu the King by Alfred Jarry. It was a pretty special session. We talked about the life, work, miracles and texts of the remarkable French writer — arguably the founder of modern theatre, the father of the still active philosophical movement known as Pataphysics and the creator of word games and revolutionary concepts for understanding human corruption —with the translator and teacher Marilena Chiara, with Reading Club regulars sharing their memories of notable performances.
For example, some of us recalled the legendary performance of the play at the Liceu in 1977, and reminded that both Picasso and especially Miró were fascinated by the ‘Pataphysical personage par excellence, who in this country at that time was interpreted as an allusion to the dictator Francisco Franco.
Alfred Jarry. The True Portrait of King Ubu. 1896. Woodcut (state XIV of XX). Bibliothèque Nationale de France
The thirst for power, the eccentric egocentrism and the political and social implications of the character of Ubu contribute to the continuing relevance and topicality of Jarry’st heatre and its capacity to stimulate discussion on many different levels: from the analysis of the fusion between art and life, stage and audience (in view of Jarry’s obsessive identification with Ubu, his creation) to the relationship between the arts — literature, theatre and painting in Picasso and Miró —by way of a reflection on aesthetic categories such as the humorous, the comic and the grotesque - the ubuesque as defined by Michel Foucault. When all is said and done, Ubu is each one of us and Poland, which in Jarry’s work is ‘nowhere’, is in fact anywhere, this space of reflection itself.
For the last session of this season we will be talking about “Homenatge a Picasso” by Josep Palau i Fabre, with Jordi Coca in the chair, and thinking about the author’s biographical involvement with the painter. Keep reading!
Jorge Carrión and Marilena de Chiara
www.jorgecarrion.com
Related links
From Picasso’s caricature Dream and Lie of Franco to Toño Salazar’s Coplas
