Article reprinted in Jarry dramaturge, Paris, Nizet, 1980, 304 p., [16] p. ill. 24 cm, publications de la Sorbonne. Littérature Series; 12. Work revised and updated under the title: La Dramaturgie d'Alfred Jarry, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2003, 412 p., coll. Littérature de notre siècle, n° 22. UBU ENCHAINED (September 22, 1937) Performed by the Le Diable Écarlate Company, directed by Sylvain Itkine, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées from September 22 to 26, 1937, as part of the Exhibition's Experimental Theater. Direction: Sylvain Itkine Sets: Max Ernst Father Ubu: Jean Temerson Mother Ubu: Gabrielle Fontan Pissembock: Sylvain Itkine Free Men: Roger Blin, Émile Rosen, Guy Decomble Jailer: Henri Leduc

Here are the pages devoted to Sylvain Itkine's staging:

THE 1937 CREATION As early as 1933, Sylvain Itkine had intended to found his own company based on a staging of Ubu enchained, a text which, it is said, had been pointed out to him by André Breton. In fact, the project was only realized in September 1937, as part of the International Exhibition's Experimental Theater, at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées (1)

PRELIMINARIES The young theater director considered that the work was a rediscovery of the surrealists and that it was up to them to sponsor his enterprise by helping him both with decoration and publicity to the informed public. This is why he gathered pictorial, poetic or theoretical collaborations from members of the movement in a booklet published on the occasion of the premiere of Ubu enchained. There would be much to say about the figurative representation that Jarry's work aroused among the surrealists (2). Their poems show a tyrannical Ubu who equals God and even dreams of bursting his belly to remain the sole dominator. All the essays gathered in this collection converge to affirm the circumstantial interest of the play which evokes — quite despite itself — certain contemporary crises: Moscow Trials, Franco's aggression against the Spanish Republic, establishment of fascist terror in Italy and Germany... The surrealists have great difficulty not making it a thesis play. Maurice Heine avoids the pitfall by insisting on the liberating and revolutionary character of laughter. Sylvain Itkine remarked, for his part, that one had to react against the decadence of contemporary theater without waiting for the change of social regime that he called for with all his wishes. Ubu enchained seemed to him a good opportunity to declare war "on all the infection of French theater," and he relied on this point on the epigraph: Father Ubu: — Cornegidouille! We will not have demolished everything if we do not demolish even the ruins! Now I see no other means than to balance beautiful well-ordered edifices (OC I, 427).

But his choice was especially guided by dramatic considerations. Jarry's work satisfies him "intellectually":

for it vigorously breaks and without prejudice of construction with all premeditated theatrical architecture. Not only is the theatrical verve unexpected and often unusual since neologisms are numerous, but the very rapid unfolding of very short scenes imposes a simplification in the decor which goes as far as pure and simple abstraction [...]. But not to obey a more or less Shakespearean tradition, not to develop a stylization system, simply because the subject and characters invade the decor and, properly speaking, burst the envelope...

The liberated form could only coincide with his desire for aesthetic revolution. Renouncing the famous debate between realistic or symbolist staging, Itkine wanted to impose a vision of the stage which, while not bearing the surrealist label, was nevertheless analogous to the group's project in other domains. Like the poem, which no longer has to describe reality or analyze feelings, theater must be a force of suggestion and revolt, even if it means delivering, beforehand, an aggression on the spectator. In an "Intervention about Jarry" of which a fragment occupies the central part of the brochure and which will be published in extenso in La Nouvelle Saison (n° I, November 1937) under the title "Saluer le drapaud", Sylvain Itkine confirms the reasons for his choice. His staging will indeed be a declaration of war, an act of rupture; but by surpassing the primary scope of the work, he affirms his faith in the future:

I insist on the fact that Ubu enchained, which brings no concrete conclusion or solution, and in which inferior powers triumph unilaterally, ruins established things and, for this reason, must serve as a starting point for our action and not as food for our skepticism.

He therefore intends to situate himself at a point of no return. This is why his interpretation of the work focuses on the social aspect, allowing one to see in it a critique of democracy reduced to simple formulas, to a formalist practice of popular expression, at the same time as a denunciation of "the narrow stupidity of royalism, the purulent access of phynance, the senility of bourgeois justice, that is to say all the merdre". Ubu embodies in his roundness all the "qualities" of the ruling bourgeoisie, pushed to their extreme and simply aiming at the satisfaction of his lowest appetites. But beyond this representation of all contemporary myths, the spectacle must bring the audience to a collective murder:

At this particularly gripping moment of human destiny, it is necessary to have before one's eyes the belly full of nauseating glory of this Father Ubu whom we will well have to assassinate one day in the light.

Through this ritual manifestation, it is indeed a question of engaging in an act of exorcism, of freeing oneself from all the fantasies of dictatorship, tyranny or slavery in order to arrive at a new declaration of human rights:

If there is no conclusion included in Jarry's play, we can draw one from it; and for us it will be the affirmation of our revolutionary will, our constant refusal of all compromise and an offensive energy in the direction of our emancipation, both individual and collective, both moral and social.

Jarry's lesson, as Itkine conceives it, is that of an absolute non-conformism, a preparatory and necessary phase for the emergence of authentic freedom, accessible only through violent conquest. The playwright's approach is indeed that of a rigorous dialectic: after having passed through a deliberately negative phase, the revolution having "drained Ubu-capital" will have to engage in the constructive path of affirming the essential principles for regenerated humanity. The representation of Ubu enchained will be, in a way, an enterprise of purification, it must mark the aggressive and tearing reversal from against to for. Initial operation therefore and not conclusion. First act, the only possible one in the current state of society, which should be followed by other constructive works accompanying the establishment of the revolutionary regime. Unfortunately destiny decided otherwise. The dreamed liberation gave way to Nazi occupation and Sylvain Itkine, continuing to fight by material means, lost his existence there.

THE STAGING We have had the good fortune to be able to consult all the preparatory notes and documents for the staging established by Sylvain Itkine. The latter, not trusting his capricious memory, indeed had the habit of preparing his realizations minutely, while paying great attention to the intuition of one and the other (actors, set designer, musicians...), to their sensitivity, and to the phenomena of objective chance that could intervene during rehearsals. His task as director consisting, according to him, in giving "all its power to this set of suprarational forces which are the very fact of theater" (3). He is especially concerned with imprinting a very animated rhythm on the representation, while following the text to the letter, scrupulously. The problem is indeed to change decor quickly without breaking the harmony of the whole, insofar as, unlike Lugné-Poe with Ubu roi, he chose to situate each scene in an adequate decor, halfway between realism and fantasy or evocative magic. Ensemble movements and combats particularly retain his attention. The maleficent Father Ubu terrifies the gentle Eleuthère: "arrived just behind [her] he puts his hand on her shoulders, Eleuthère finds herself almost crouching". One sees that Ubu is not a weakling! He strikes Pissembock heavily who, each time, makes a comeback. Let us retain this moment where Father Ubu draws vanity and satisfaction from the whip blows that Pissedoux deals him. Mother Ubu exclaims: "You look like a clog turning into eel skin, Father Ubu". And doubtless by sound association, Itkine notes this: "Pissedoux whips Ubu who turns like a clog on stage. Mother Ubu avoids him and admires him idiotically. Long stage business. The light blazes in red and golden tones with flashes", the whole being rhythmically accompanied by a waltz tune. Here, as an example, is how he conceives the organization of the battle that opposes rebellious Masters and convicts (V, 5). Pissedoux enters first (back stage) pulling the cannon practicable (by a chain) which hides the Free Men up to mid-body. These are bound by an enormous chain and speak lamentably and slowly. Single cannon shot (aborted) metallic noise [...] Ubu goes to Pissedoux, strikes him with the cannonball. Pissedoux falls into the arms of the first Free Man, then he takes one of the jailers, pushes him, and the whole square follows the push. He pushes, pulls, pushes — the square aggregates the Free Men and in a howling debacle everyone turns around Ubu who no longer touches anyone but commands the movements like a conductor. One sees, by such stage business, how much Itkine had managed to penetrate the Jarryesque spirit by pushing to derision and magnifying Father Ubu. All scenes, even the most anodyne, were the object of such theatrical revaluation, and particularly that of the tribunal, treated as a puppet show. This is because, like the author he strives to serve, our director has a sense of gag. A photo4 shows us Eleuthère in her room, surprised to see her uncle alive, a candle in hand: "And you, my uncle, w... w... why aren't you dead!" she exclaims, and her stuttering blows out the flame. Another photo has captured the precise moment when Mother Ubu, declaring sententiously "Knock and it shall be opened unto you!" (V, 2) strikes her jug on Pissembock's head and splits him in two. After having noted the blocking which coordinates the movements, Sylvain Itkine characterizes each character's acting:

Ubu: Get used to the volume of the body — slow, imposing movements, turns on the spot like a top. Mother Ubu: Holds her hands in the direction of the body, fingers spread, her head moves almost alone — either mischievous or whining — chest forward, bottom sticking out. Pissembock: Gentle, conventional, old dandy falsely distinguished, measured, cold, almost airy, without thickness (perhaps Chaplinesque in affirmative humor), speaks almost always in the same tone with Eleuthère (uncle), barely raises his tone a little at the tribunal. For the scene where he is cut in two, consider double profile with mask, or two divergent shadows.

In parallel, and they will appear on his stage direction, come the lighting effects, color combinations, sound effects. Thus the curtain rise is preceded by a dissonance:

two notes or one from a muted trumpet recalling the "Merdre" of Ubu roi by something unpleasant. — Night falls in the auditorium with as much as possible a similar rhythm — the light diminishes almost completely — relights more than before and night falls again very brutally — the curtain rises quickly — a very thin beam of light coming from the auditorium searches the empty stage and fixes at the center — great noise of chairs on the metal plate in the wings. Ubu advances rapidly and with great racket in the light. Mother Ubu stands aside, a little behind (cheating) — Ubu opens his mouth — The same or the same two notes repeat but in tune — One must recognize them well and think of a poetic merdre...

A photo (5) preserves the precious instant when the demolishers transform the devotees' salon into a prison cell. One sees Ubu sprawled under a bundle of straw that a demolisher waters (Roger Blin) while an academician in full dress lights a street lamp. It is doubtless at such moments that one should speak of surrealism and poetry of theater if the whole representation did not illustrate the spirit of this movement. To this atmosphere participated greatly — but not exclusively — the five collage sets of Max Ernst. For Act I (the Champ de Mars) the painter, who was practicing theatrical decoration for the first time, had imagined a space in closed perspective on the Eiffel Tower, the lateral partitions bearing the reproduction of the famous "Sower" of 25c stamps, a cyclist (figure cut out from a fashion catalog) and the full-length portrait of the infantryman in full dress (6). Pissembock's vestibule (2nd tableau, Act II, scene 2) is a simple wall decorated with a wainscot baseboard, presenting at the cornice two paintings of which one, very characteristic of the master's manner, is a hunting trophy, composed of horned animal heads with, surmounting the whole, a roaring lion's head. Eleuthère's room (3rd tableau, II, 3) is made quite simply of a four-poster bed and a small dressing table, collage taken from a furniture catalog. The prison decor is less stylized; one sees, in the foreground, the door decorated by an immense padlock, the roof is surmounted by the national flag in the shape of an axe, recalling the motifs crowning the two pillars of the door: a barrel made of short pikes, entwined by a tricolor ribbon, an axe planted in the middle. On each side of the grills, a small sentry box for the Free Men. The fourth tableau shows simultaneously the harem detour and the Turks' camp: an immense green flag bearing the star and crescent and, on the other side, the devotees' salon made of a lamp and two chairs with religious motifs, vignettes also borrowed from a catalog. Finally Sclavonia is illustrated by a decor mixing trompe-l'œil (two pyramidal columns adorned with shackled hands) and real objects: a sign "La Sclavonia" hung from real chains from which hangs a tandem coming, the program tells us, from the cycle-sports-leisure department of the Palais de la Nouveauté, a feminine mask, a chair, an umbrella. In the background, the Bosphorus and the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, above which was to pass and repass a bat extracted, it too, from an old work, if we believe Max Ernst's project. The whole of these collage sets "composed with the help of elements of old images", and "restored by enlarging the models to the dimensions of real objects", arranged themselves in "period landscapes of singular humor" according to Marcel Jean, himself interpreter of the Happy Rival in l'Objet Aimé (7). Contrary to certain journalists' affirmation, the costumes were not by Max Ernst, then spinning happy days in the Midi with Leonora Carrington, so that they had to be improvised at the last moment (8). But Max Ernst's sets "formed the surrealist structure of this representation of Ubu (9)". The music, borrowed from Claude Terrasse (the debraining song) recalled the historical representation of Ubu roi.

THE AUDIENCE'S RECEPTION The representation of Ubu enchained met with an incontestable success, prepared long in advance by the gossip columnists presenting Jarry to their readers, spreading serious indiscretions about the director and his companions, making known their intentions of rupture. The spectacle announced itself as an event worthy of the most famous surrealist manifestations. One therefore jostled at the entrance, to such an extent that the theater director had to turn away the excess public. Benjamin Crémieux corroborates here his colleagues' sayings:

A full house where surrealists, ex-surrealists, para-surrealists rubbed shoulders with a less dogmatic but equally virulent youth demanding at each curtain fall without one being able to know exactly if it was Mr. Itkine's presentation, of a remarkable precision drollery, or else Jarry's work (10).

Of course, as for all spectacles, but even more so here given the indecision in which the author leaves us, the critics divide according to the political opinions that their journal claims to defend. The editor of Marianne (29-9-1937) finds the satire heavy and facile, but recognizes the pleasure he took in it: "Sylvain Itkine has succeeded in brocading on this play, a marvelous poem of fantasy, of burlesque, full of scenic finds..." At the two extremes of the political scene, reservations are expressed about the work and its interpretation. L'Humanité (2-10-1937) judges Ubu enchained too weak compared to Ubu roi: "Jarry has mixed there, with the memories of his military service, a certain vaguely Hegelian intellectualism (sic) [...]. One gets a little tired of the evolutions of the free men, who are the most enslaved, and of the successive enchaining of Father Ubu, supposed each time a new form of power..." The qualities of Jean Temerson, Ubu's interpreter, are praised, but it is to denigrate his comrades: "the rest of the actors is very uneven, the scenes lack homogeneity, the sets are of a somewhat dry research, the rhythm of the spectacle leaves something to be desired, the precision is almost always imperfect". On the right, the criticism, to be more skillful, is no less icy. "Ubu enchained is, unfortunately, not very well played," declares Lucien Dubech in Candide (7-10-1937), immediately wondering if the play is playable. In fact, he does not hide his enchantment for Ubu: "It is a striking prefiguration of the Popular Front". The affirmation is not without savor when, for their part, André Breton and his friends see in it the incarnation of fascism. All agree to recognize prophetic qualities in Jarry. The interest of prophets being, of course, that one can make them say what one wants. Besides, Benjamin Crémieux responds directly to Lucien Dubech: "Impossible to write a more vengeful satire of bourgeois individualism. This freedom without brake or goal which quite naturally leads to slavery has something prophetic about it" (Vendredi 30-9-1937). More finely, Pierre Audiat (Paris-Soir, 2-9-37) prefers to note Jarry's antinomic approach: It is moreover of an astonishing topicality, to believe that Alfred Jarry wrote Ubu enchained this very morning: one would say that forty years in advance he foresaw the pitiless encasernment to which those who make profession of freedom believe they must submit. Certainly, Alfred Jarry's attitude is that of an intellectual anarchist, and he who applauds Ubu roi frowns at Ubu enchained. But it is the privilege of truly independent minds to displease in turn the partisans.

Paul Chauveau, historian of Father Ubu, takes pleasure in replacing the work in its historical context:

Ubu enchained is something occasional, a juxtaposition of surrealized sketches where, more than the permanent, the current has its share: the current then contemporary, the current 1900. Mr. Sylvain Itkine the director and Mr. Max Ernst, the set designer of Le Diable Écarlate, know it well who have acted accordingly in making it however singularly present. For, in the arrangement they have just presented, it is, surpassing the work we have just said of all that precedes it and all that it supposes, the true, eternal Father Ubu, "and so on" who has appeared to us. (Nouvelles Littéraires, 2-10- 1937) To finish this contradictory press review, we will let André Rolland de Renéville speak who, influenced by his conversations with Antonin Artaud, and launching his appeal towards a regenerating Orient, sees in this spectacle a perfect success which condemns all previous theater:

The representation of Ubu enchained at the Comédie des Champs Elysées was true theater, that is to say a spectacle where the stage suddenly became the belly of an idea in gestation, inside which the characters elaborated themselves under our eyes. Each of these characters had the function of signifying the aspect of the idea of which he was the son, and for this reason, each of these characters was a word. This is enough to say that their evolutions concurred to form before the public a poem of a species not unknown, but forgotten where gesture, color, speech became the simple degrees of manifestation of which their agreement was the goal. In attending Ubu enchained one lived this truth that Europe is only a capital point of the Asian continent so much was the great oriental tradition of theater found again at once by the grace of Alfred Jarry's genius, and the intelligence of the actors who had respectively put themselves at his service (11). Apart from the reservations already noted of the editors of Candide and l'Humanité, the whole press praises the perfect cohesion of the spectacle: "One must congratulate the director, Mr. Sylvain Itkine, for the unity of style he has managed to make reign among all the collaborators" (Beaux-Arts, 1-10-1937). "Moreover, the young director of Le Diable Écarlate possesses a very acute sense of theatrical things; one admires the justness of tone, the precision in the details of his staging..." (Claude Hervin, Paris-Midi, 27-9-1937). The praise is flattering when one thinks that a good number of the interpreters were amateurs, generally more at ease for poetry or painting than in comedy. If one admires the Ubu couple, constituted by Jean Temerson and Gabrielle Fontan, "the hypertrophy of the average French couple, drawn with a genial bad faith and a spirit of simplification which enchanted us" (Marianne, 29-9-1937), some reproaches nevertheless arise against Temerson whose voice does not correspond to the physique. In conclusion, the few representations given by Le Diable Écarlate indeed mark a date in theater history. The Exhibition's Experimental Theater confirms the existence of a new generation of directors, among whom Sylvain Itkine is not far from figuring in first place.

Meaning of the work The press extracts cited above show that the interpretations of Ubu enchained diverge notably according to the political belonging of their authors. The first commentator who mentioned it, Paul Chauveau, sees in it only a pale dilution of the first success: "certain scenes are still of the great Ubu vein. Yet this second Ubu is far from being worth the first. When one has known how to say 'Merdre' once and for all appropriately, with an accent, a happiness still unequaled and doubtless unsuspected, this concise discourse loses its effectiveness in being chewed over (12)". He will nuance this impression, we have seen, in reviewing the Le Diable Écarlate's interpretation: the play then seems to him to echo, through the anecdote, the anarchizing concerns of the collaborators of La Revue blanche. The emphasis placed by the surrealists, in the already described booklet, on the prophetic aspect of Ubu enchained invited such affirmations. Long after, the Collège de 'Pataphysique will bring out the only meaning that seems to us to correspond to Jarry's feelings: While Ubu roi is abstract in its meaning, of that abstraction characteristic of adolescence and which seduced Jarry by its universal mythical scope, Ubu enchained on the contrary has a social, polemical and one might say "political" content very apparent. But one should not be duped either. However amusing and successful literarily speaking certain scenes may be, like the Free Men's exercises — and by that Ubu enchained would be superior to Ubu roi! — they must not make us forget the constantly contradictory character of the play, which entirely develops on the plane of a negation so total that it denies itself "and so on" and cannot therefore be confused with a satire (13). We will pass over the lucubrations of a polygraph who, caricaturing the methods of the worst Lanson criticism, finds in Ubu enchained allusions by Jarry to his personal situation: disappointed with existence, he would take it out, through Father Ubu's intermediary, on all his detractors, which does not prevent saying that: "the play affirms itself a comedy of characters" [sic]14. After having reviewed all the hypotheses emitted about this decoy, we must adopt a position, even if it means getting caught, in our turn, in the glue disposed by Jarry. Certainly, one can always "interpret" a dramatic work by giving it a meaning that the author had not envisaged. The thing is all the easier, in the present case, that Alfred Jarry has not pronounced himself. It must be admitted that, knowing his friendship for certain anarchist milieus, confirmed by several of his articles, one could have had strong reasons to believe that Ubu roi aimed, through irony, at any form of authority. But a major objection presents itself when one establishes a relation between Ubu roi and Ubu enchained. If the first of these dramas is indeed a satire of royalty and tyranny, the second becomes a denunciation of democracy and anarchy, according to the axiom posed by Pissedoux "freedom is slavery!" (V, 1). There is here a theoretical incoherence that provokes the commentators' malaise. For them, Jarry cannot handle paradox to this point, he must choose the regime of which he is partisan. Now, Sylvain Itkine resolves the dilemma, not by making the rights of humor intervene, since we know that the 'Pataphysics to which Jarry adheres is a serious science, but by overcoming the parodic and satirical aspect of the work by an appeal to revolt. Like Ubu roi, Ubu enchained expresses a lesson of absolute disrespect. This is indeed what demonstrates the system of inversion of factors that we have analyzed previously: Jarry supports with the same ardor the thesis and the antithesis; it is up to the spectator to make his own synthesis. If Ubu enchained seems to unfold in the France of 1900, it is by an optical illusion as deceptive as that which would make us believe that the Poland of Ubu roi is a real country. That Ubu can pass from the Land of Free Men to the Sublime Porte where he is recognized by the Sultan as his brother, here is what allows denying time. Not that there is no internal temporality to the play (Sylvain Itkine has very skillfully drawn advantage from it by his lighting effects), but it is the whole that situates itself in the imaginary. Same for the places, which one can easily circumscribe, while they respond to a unique principle: Ubu displaces his decor with him. In truth, all the indices that would allow anchoring the work in a certain reality are factitious: it is quite simply a question of adding a new episode to the adventures of a marionette maneuvered by a child become adult and who refuses to believe it. It is the man who renounces choosing between theater and life, for whom life is only a theater. Hence a whole set of propositions that deny themselves as soon as affirmed. The spectator could believe himself at the theater, that is why policemen and demolishers, emerged from who knows where, transform the devotees' salon into a prison by means of very realistic accessories. This is also why one can bring out with so much rigor a coherent actantial structure, as Propp and Greimas have been able to do for the popular tale. This is because, more than a drama where the action would knot to then relax according to a known schema, we have to do with a non-closed narrative ensemble comparable, in a way, to one of the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights (15). Can one say however that at the level of the connotation structure "the quest for sadistic homosexual behaviors would transform into a quest for masochistic homosexual behaviors" (Arrivé)? However seductive it may be, this thesis does not fully satisfy us: one would have to be sure that through his slave accessories Ubu only aims at homosexual satisfaction. In our eyes it is appropriate to note, as Arrivé does moreover a little further on, an equivalence between sadism and masochism to take account of the textual reality, if not sexual. Jarry, foreseeing Freud's works (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905) would therefore establish a liaison between sadistic perversion and masochistic perversion, showing that they are the two aspects of a single deep tendency of the individual. Let us specify that the sexuality in question here is understood in the broad sense that psychoanalysis assigns to it; it does not designate only the functioning of the genital apparatus, but the whole of the pleasure that Ubu seeks through his activities. To say that Ubu is homosexual amounts to denying the nature of the dramatic relationship that is established, in the two plays, between Father Ubu and Mother Ubu. We have already noted that they constituted an indissoluble couple, now, the nature of their relations has not changed from one work to the other, they continue to fight, therefore to manifest a mutual feeling, even if the rest is not specified. As for knowing if the inversion process to which Jarry indulges between the two plays manifests a homosexual tendency, moreover confirmed by the biography, let us say very clearly that this problem does not interest us. In our view, Ubu enchained, complementary and symmetrical to Ubu roi, demonstrates nothing other than the equality of for and against, of despotism and servility. In each of the two opposed situations, Ubu ensures the power of inferior appetites:

Of the three souls that Plato distinguishes: of the head, of the heart and of the belly, this last alone, in him, is not embryonic (OC I, 467).

In any case, Ubu only aims at satisfying his libido. Let no one be scandalized, the function of theater is perhaps to teach us this: to awaken the bear that is in us, to know where we stand. All this is profoundly moral, as Jarry says about the marvelous stories of Princess Scheherazade "and perhaps there are even no morals but the stories that deal with things situated below the waist" (OC II 628). According to a movement of thought many times affirmed by André Breton, it was appropriate to bring to light these obscure tendencies of the individual and to show their relation with social behavior (16). As in Dionysian theater, the Jarryesque work supposes a catharsis of the spectator or, more exactly, of the collectivity. This by means of a very indirect revelation of our most secret passions, through a buffoon evolving in a hyper conventional universe, synthesis of all possible States. Here the important thing is not so much the purgation of passions as the emphasis placed on their manifestation. The merit of the Le Diable Écarlate company of Sylvain Itkine is not to have neglected the relation of the sexual to the political, by inviting the audience to rid itself of its demons in order, subsequently, to dominate them. After Ubu roi and Ubu enchained the balloon is burst. Remains the man to be born, in his infinite freedom.

Documents: Georgette Gabey Collection; Ubu enchained notebook serving as program; Revue d'Histoire du théâtre, 1964, n° 3 and 1972, n° 1. La dramaturgie d'Alfred Jarry: Béhar, Henri: Free download, borrowing and streaming: Internet Archive

1. Exactly from September 22 to 26, that is during five performances. For everything concerning this creation, refer to our article "A surrealist staging...", Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre, n° 1, 1972.
2. See on this subject José Pierre's article, "Ubu peint, ou la Physique, la Phynance et la Merdre", and especially the supporting illustrations, in Ubu cent ans de règne, catalog of the exhibition at the SEITA Gallery, 1989, p. 27-49.
3. Sylvain Itkine: "Propos sur la mise en scène", Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre, July-Sept 1964, p. 241. The text is from 1942, but it integrates the author's previous experience, particularly that of Ubu enchained.
4. All the stage photographs mentioned here will be found reproduced in the Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre, n°1, 1972 and h.t. 10 to 17.
5. It has been reproduced in the Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre, July-Sept. 1964, in the off-text of page 248: one must read: "Set by Max Ernst" and not by Jean Effel.
6. These sets are reproduced in Werner Spies's work, Max Ernst, les collages, inventaire et contradictions, Gallimard, 1974, ill. 486 and 487.
7. Marcel Jean, Histoire de la Peinture surréaliste, Paris, Le Seuil, 1959, p. 289.
8. Marcel Jean: Ibidem. In fact the costumes are discordant and conventional: priest's outfit for Brother Tiberge, caftan for the Sultan, philosophical woolen robe adorned with a ventral spiral for Father Ubu, Academician's outfit for the street lamp lighter, all other characters have a more or less outdated city outfit; the Free Men in striped suits, wear bowler hat for maneuvers colonial helmet for combats, and handle small children's carbines provided by the "Au train bleu" store.
9. Albert Cymboliste, in Courrier graphique, Oct. 1937.
10. Benjamin Crémieux, in Vendredi, 31-9-1937.
11. A. Rolland de Renéville. "First representations of Ubu enchained", N.R.F., November 1, 1937.
12. Paul Chauveau, Alfred Jarry, Mercure de France, 1932, p. 130
13. J.-H. Sainmont: "Ubu ou la création d'un mythe", Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique, n° 3-4, p. 66-67.
14. Louis Perche, Jarry, Editions universitaires, 1965, p. 64.
15. Jarry particularly liked this text in Mardrus's translation; see his reviews in La Revue blanche of July 1, 1900, October 1
16. Cf. André Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme, 1924: "If the depths of our mind conceal strange forces capable of augmenting those of the surface, or of fighting victoriously against them, there is every interest in capturing them first, to submit them then, if need be, to the control of our reason". Freud's thought is not different on this point.