What started as a schoolboy joke became a revolution in theatre when this bizarre and comic retelling of MacBeth premiered in 1896. The story goes that at the Paris opening, the uttering of its first word (a mispronunciation of the word “merde”) incited riots as the play assaulted all that the theatre and its community of aristocratic patrons had held sacred. That night a new form of comedy was born, and unleashed on the world was the monstrous Pere Ubu, a personification of all that is base within us.