President Ubu

 I have mentioned before on this blog that I have a tendency when reading great works of the theater to suddenly picture in my mind's eye the costumes and setting re-staged for the Trump era. I don't want this to be the case. I don't like the ex-president invading my thoughts any more than I like him invading my news feed. But I can't help it. So many plays, in both the farcical and the tragic vein, deal with the excesses of human folly and arrogance being cut down to size. The spectacle of hubris punished is, after all, the classical template of drama. And when a twenty-first century American sees one of these swaggering theatrical leads strut out onto the stage, who else can they think of but our clownish yet terrifying ex-president? And if we accept that a historical production could well be re-staged with the lead actor now done up in orange clown make-up, what better play to serve as our vehicle than Alfred Jarry's proto-surrealist masterpiece, Ubu Roi?

It would have been argued in prior decades, perhaps, that Jarry's eponymous protagonist is too extreme a caricature to be portrayed in the costume of any real-world politician. Father Ubu, as he is known in the play, is after all a comically exaggerated monster of appetites. Driven solely by pride, cupidity, and gluttony, he is both a watchword of lust and an utter craven. In short, he puts one in mind of Plato's theorized template of the "tyrannical man," whose soul is given over into the custody of his basest hungers. He is, in this respect, a universal archetype, not to be reduced to any one time and place, but rather representing an aspect of the human soul: the devil in all of us who must perennially be wrestled to the ground by our better natures--the part of us the poet John Davidson had in mind when he said: "If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,/ He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all."

Because of this universal aspect of Ubu, Jarry himself recommended against setting his play with any recognizable costumes or scenery. Ubu is "eternal," he is quoted--in the preface to his play published by New Directions in Barbara Wright's translation--and therefore "[t]he costumes should give us as little as possible the impression of local colour or chronology." It would seem the playwright would therefore disapprove of my idea of restaging the play with Ubu painted orange and sitting in the Oval Office. On the other hand, Jarry suggested his minimalist and nondescript approach to the staging as a means to better invite the theatergoer to envision their own version of Ubu; and Trump is what comes to mind for me. Plus, Jarry's next words state that the setting ought to be "modern; and sordid, to make the play appear more wretched and horrific," and a Trump staging would certainly achieve that. 

It is is not only Ubu's grotesque personality that puts one in mind of the "wretched and horrific" former occupant of the White House, meanwhile, it is also the arc of his career. Father Ubu seizes power in a fictional Poland for the usual reasons: lust for authority and riches; the sheer wish to lord it over others. But he is so utterly lacking in even the most crassly self-interested understanding of reciprocity and mutuality that he doesn't realize that to continue to rule-- even in a despotic state-- one must cultivate and maintain at least some people's allegiance. Instead of doing so, he casts off and jails his co-conspirators as soon as they have installed him in power; then he is astounded when they turn on him and join the cause of his rival to the throne. He massacres the nobility in order to seize their lands; and then he is put out when he finds he must now undertake the duty of tax-collecting himself. 

And then, in a particularly Trumpian way, he is so self-involved that, despite having shown no mercy to any other human being in the entire play, he fully expects pity himself as soon as he is in danger. "Oho! I'm afraid, I'm afraid!" he cries. "Oh! I think I'm going to die. Oh, poor man that I am! What will become of me, great God?" After scrambling up to safety and leaving his underlings to perish in his place, he has no compunction about stealing credit for their performance when they are ultimately able to fight back their attacker. It was his extraordinary prayers that did it, he proclaims-- his spiritual intervention that saved the day, not their physical courage. How can one not think of Trump posting self-flattering memes on social media all through the carnage of a midterm election that defeated most of his favored candidates, then emerging from the ashes to defy the wishes of party elders by declaring his intention to run for office yet again, then to compound the whole fiasco a few weeks later by publicly consorting with Holocaust-deniers and Antisemites? 

Ubu is, as I say, an extreme caricature; but time and again Trump has himself played the role (willfully? knowingly? It has never been clear) of a similarly outsized stock character: the buffoon, the narcissistic sociopath so completely lacking in self-awareness and any sense of his impact on the world that he would devour the whole Earth and everyone in it, much as Davidson described, if it could save him a moment's pain in his pinky finger. In this regard, Trump has placed us all into a farce of his own devising, but one that is simultaneously performed in deadly earnest. And this too is the final and perhaps most significant way in which his tale and Ubu's cry out to be united on the stage. 

Jarry's play is, like Trump's presidency, an exercise in farce, but one that its author insisted had an undercurrent of deep seriousness. One of his chosen actors for the title role, he relates in an essay appended to the play, originally wished to perform it as a tragic arc-- the fall of Ubu Roi. "[T]he comedy," says Jarry, "must [therefore] at the most be the macabre comedy of an English clown, or of a Dance of Death." 

In this respect, it reminds us of Brecht's admonition at the end of his The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: "If we could learn to look instead of gawking,/ We'd see the horror in the heart of farce." (Tabori trans.)  Jarry wished to show us something horrible, as well as funny. He compared the play to an "exaggerating mirror [...] in which the depraved [see] themselves with dragon's bodies, or bull's horns[.]" Ubu showed our "ignoble other-self" to us, as Jarry puts it, whether we wished to see this or not. And is that anything different than what Trump has done, at last, in the six years now that his presidential aspirations have plagued us, and that he intends by all appearance to keep doing as long as he is able?