Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi, detail of woodcut illustration for Le Livre d'Art, no. 2, May 1896. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers,
The State University of New Jersey, Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Museum Library Fund.
(Photo by Jack Abraham)

UBU ROI

While Montmartre witnessed many outrageous events in its heyday, most legendary of all are the varied appearances of Alfred Jarry's obese, obscene, and amoral King Ubu. On 9 and 10 December 1896, this literary provocateur directed two performances of Ubu Roi, his only ones to employ live actors. Staged at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, only a short walk from the Quat'z'Arts cabaret, the production featured stage set design and masks by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Sérusier, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Ranson, and Jarry, and music composed by Claude Terrasse, Bonnard's brother-in-law. But Jarry preferred a marionette production to one with human actors, and it was François Trombert who gave him the opportunity to present his play with puppets to a large audience.  Beginning on the evening of 27 November 1901, the Quat'z'Arts hosted sixty-four puppet performances of a two-act version of Ubu Roi, retitled Ubu sur la butte.  The production of Ubu sur la butte at the Quat'z'Arts was the apex of Jarry's brief but influential theatrical career. In the course of its many performances, young artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso and Apollinaire both saw Jarry's infamous play brought to life by its author and encountered the cabaret's collage-like wall journal , Le Mur.