Word: roi
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...Roi," Alfred Jarry's absurd 1896 play from which the musical "Ubu Rock" was adapted, is a farce that was originally written to mock Jarry's arrogant math teacher. It is the story of how a revolting, scatological member of the wealthy bourgeoisie takes over Poland. Audiences were disgusted by the play when it was first produced nearly a century ago. A few Boston theater-goers may have been revolted by "Ubu Rock" (every once in a while, little old ladies walk out of the show), but most found the show's music, acting and writing riotous-in the best...
...buffs: people with a taste for the macaronic and the absurd, who saw in his work a visual resurgence of the antiauthoritarian wit whose chief image in French literature was the grotesque kinglet of Poland invented nearly a century ago by Alfred Jarry in his play Ubu Roi. From the moment Ubu waddled onstage and pronounced his first line, "Merdrrre!," the vaporous culture of Symbolism was on the way out and something newer and indubitably nastier was on its way in. "After us the Savage God," noted W.B. Yeats, who was in the audience that night...
...post-funny? That was the question raised last week by the newest work of Poland's Krzysztof Penderecki, 57, a leading European composer who has increasingly been changing the gardes, from avant to rear. UBU REX, which opened the Munich Opera Festival, is based on the 1896 play Ubu roi, by French Absurdist Alfred Jarry, about a loathsome clod (read: typical bourgeois) who murders the King of Poland and, supplanting him, ruins the country. Yet even with the events of the past two years before him, Penderecki draws no particular political symbolism from the text, and his harmless, rather charmless...
...funniest. It started life as an anthropological photo of an African corn bin. This reminded Ernst of an elephant. Then he saw a swollen human figure in it -- a failed behemoth, which he associated with the absurd and nasty king of Alfred Jarry's proto-Surrealist comedy, Ubu Roi. Add to that a dirty children's rhyme he remembered from his school days, which in English would have been a limerick; it concerned an elephant in Sumatra that tried to, well, connect with its grandmother. The naked woman in the foreground foreshadows the title of Ernst's great collage-narrative...
...superficial way: a style analogous to the poise and manners of the true gentleman, a conception of human character that was forming at the Stuart court even as he worked there and was thought to radiate from the person of the King. Let the French have their Roi Soleil, a periwigged divinity; Van Dyck would give the court an iconography of kingship that was, if not exactly informal, at least more humanly accessible...