biography
pronunciation:
[zharee]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1873–1907)
|
| biography:
| Writer, born in Laval, NW France. Educated at Rennes, his satirical play, Ubu-Roi, was first written when he was 15; later rewritten as a marionette play, it was given its first live stage performance in 1896. Now considered the founding play of the avant-garde theatre, it was a seminal influence on French Surrealism and on the Theatre of the Absurd. Many of the marionette elements in the play became common currency in the works of playwrights such as Genet and Ionesco and directors such as Brecht and Roger Planchon (1931– ). Seen as a vehicle for subversion against authoritarian society, the play was banned in the Soviet Union and its satellite states during the 1960s. Jarry went on to write short stories, poems, and other plays in a Surrealist style, inventing an anarchic logic of the absurd which he called pataphysique and developing the farcical prototype of the anti-hero of the 20th-c. He ended his life destitute and alcoholic. |
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