BEAUMONT, Keith. Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study. Leicester: University Press. 1984.
Tall 8vo. Original publisher's black cloth with gilt title lettering to spine, original brown illustrated papers, illustrated with black and white photographic plates, pp. [x], 364; offsetting to fly-leaves and minor bumping to top and bottom of spine, otherwise near fine.
Loosely inserted illustrated flyer advertising a series of three evenings celebrating the centenary of the play Ubu Roi, entitled 'Around and about UBU' at The Institut Français. This includes an introduction to Jarry 100 years to the day after the first performance of Ubu Roi at the Nouveau Theatre in Paris (Tuesday 10th December 1996).
This comprehensive study of French proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry’s work incorporates the full scale of his creative antics beginning with his Ubu plays, poetry and novels, all the way to the musical comedies of his later years and his literary criticism. With a considerable influence on the subsequent Dada and Surrealist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, he also played a crucial role in the genesis of The Theatre of the Absurd in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
As Beaumont writes, 'the premiere of Ubu Roi on 10 December 1986 had the effect of a bombshell'. Ubu Roi was written when Jarry was merely 23 years old and the play incited riot and great controversy in the face of its obscenity. Presumed to be a parody of Macbeth in which a revolutionary murders the king of Poland, it was an attack on the era’s theatrical and creative complacency what with the prolific dramatist Eugene Scribe, upon his election to the Academie Francaise in 1836, stating that an audience is merely amused by ‘truth not fiction’. It not only caused sensation but would go on to influence the later development of French Theatre.
Alfred Jarry christened himself a Pataphysicist, pupil to his own strand of philosophy, a parody of science he described as 'the science of imaginary solutions'. His eccentric existence drew in interest from personalities such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso.
He died prematurely of tuberculosis at the age of 34, induced by drug and alcohol abuse, but his unique legacy still prevails.
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