Today in Labor History December 10, 1896: Alfred Jarry's play, Ubu Roi, premiered in Paris. At the end of the performance, a riot broke out. Many in the audience were confused and outraged by the obscenity and disrespect they felt in the performance. Others, like W. B. Yeats, thought it was revolutionary. Jarry’s work was a precursor to Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Ubu Roi is a parody of Shakespeare's Macbeth and parts of Hamlet and King Lear. However, having recently reread the play, I found an uncanny resemblance between Pere Ubu and Donald Trump.
Today in Labor History September 7, 1911: French poet, playwright and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum. They released him after a week. The crime had actually been committed by his former secretary. Apollinaire was one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism. In fact, he was credited with coining both of these terms, the latter in1917, with respect to the ballet, Parade, with music by Erik Satie, libretto by Jean Cocteau, and costumes by Pablo Picasso. Apollinaire wrote one of the first Surrealist literary works, the play “The Breasts of Tiresias” (1917). He was admired during his lifetime by the young poets who later formed the nucleus of the Surrealist group (Breton, Aragon, Soupault). Apollinaire died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.