Slave Ubu

The third and final part of The Ubu Plays, Alfred Jarry's surreal and hilarious satire of power, greed, and bourgeois pretension. Slave Ubu concludes the adventures of Pa Ubu.

In Slave Ubu (Ubu enchaȋné) Pa Ubu decides that he has had enough of tyranny, and that the only way to be free is to become a slave, with unpredictable results.

The Ubu Plays (King Ubu, Cuckold Ubu and Slave Ubu) caused scandal when they first appeared in Paris in the 1890s, with their surreal and frequently obscene energy, and their broad parodies of Shakespeare. They have since acquired cult status in European drama, and are seen by some as harbingers of modernism.

This English translation by Kenneth McLeish is published in The Ubu Plays, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series.