Ubu and the Truth Commission is a South African play by Jane Taylor. It was first produced on 26 May 1997,The world premier followed on 17 June 1997, at the Kunsfest in Weimar. directed by William Kentridge at The Laboratory in Johannesburg's Market Theatre.Including this one, before the end of 1998, the Market Theatre staged three plays related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Dead Wait is a fictional tale from the Angolan war, which details a soldier's return to South Africa and his confession of a crime. Although based on the transactions of the TRC, it is not overtly about it. The second, The Story I Am About To Tell, was created by a support group for survivors giving TRC testimony. The production starred three of them.
Produced by the Handspring Puppet Company, and employing a multimedia approach in the tradition of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, the production of Ubu combines puppetry with live actors, music, animation, and documentary footage, while drawing extensively from Alfred Jarry's absurdist production Ubu Roi (1896). It fuses the chaos of the Ubu legend with original testimony from witnesses at the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The TRC In her "Writer's Note" to the 2007 book-form publication of the play, Taylor wrote,
What has engaged me as I have followed the Commission, is the way in which individual narratives come to stand for the larger national narrative. The stories of personal grief, loss, triumph and violation now stand as an account of South Africa's recent past. History and autobiography merge. This marks a significant shift, because in the past decades of popular resistance, personal suffering was eclipsed – subordinated to a larger project of mass liberation. Now, however, we hear in individual testimony the very private patterns of language and thought that structure memory and mourning. Ubu and the Truth Commission uses these circumstances as a starting point.Taylor, "Writer's Note 2007," p. ii.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 1996 with what Taylor described as a "momentous mandate",Taylor, Writer's Note 2007, p. ii. to solicit testimony from those who identified as casualties, perpetrators, or survivors of the apartheid atrocity. Coming almost exactly two years after South Africa's first democratic elections, the Commission's purposes, in Taylor's eyes, were "to retrieve lost histories, to make reparation to those who had suffered, to provide amnesty for acts which were demonstrably political in purpose [... and, among the most important] to create a general context through which national reconciliation might be made possible."
"The Commission itself is theatre," wrote William Kentridge, "or at any rate a kind of ur-theatre [...]. One by one witnesses come and have their half hour to tell their story, pause, weep, be comforted by professional comforters who sit at the table with them. The stories are harrowing, spellbinding. The audience sit at the edge of their seats listening to every word. This is exemplary civic theatre, a public hearing of private griefs which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of a deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position."Kentridge 2007, pp. viii-ix. Of how more orthodox forms could possibly compete with this, he explained, "Our theatre is a reflection on the debate rather than the debate itself. It tries to make sense of the memory rather than be the memory." (Kentridge 2007, p. ix)
Plot Pa Ubu (played by Dawid Minnaar) has been spending a great deal of time away from home, much to the concern and suspicion of his wife (Busi Zokufa). She smells an odour on him that she suspects may be that of another woman, a mistress. But, he is an agent of a governmental death squad, and the odour that she smells is of blood and dynamite.
After the abolition of apartheid, the TRC is established. It offers amnesty to those war criminals who come forward and offer full and truthful testimony regarding their infractions. Ubu, suspecting a trick, is unsure of what to do. The play follows his indecisive actions as they lead his path finally to a convergence with that of the TRC.
Conception, production and performance Kentridge had been working for some years with the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg before the idea for Ubu and the Truth Commission was mooted. He had extensive experience with theatre that incorporated animation, puppets and actors. He did not, he claimed, pursue the multimedia realm because of any aesthetic ideal, but rather because he was skilled in the art of animation anyway and was curious to see how it would combine with puppet theatre. Woyzeck on the Highveld (1993) and Faustus in Africa (1996) were successful tone-setters in this respect. The latter, according to Kentridge, was "a huge undertaking",Kentridge 2007, p. ix. after which he and the company were on the look-out for something small to "do and survive".Kentridge 2007, p. x. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot seemed ideally suited to puppetry, "[b]ut we reckoned without the Beckett fundamentalists who would not give permission for us to leave out even a comma from the stage directions".
In a bid to secure a neo-Becketian text (but not having the skill to write their own), and after rejecting several ideas, they considered a project called Waiting Room. This consisted of interviews with land-mine victims waiting in rural orthopaedic hospitals in Angola and Mozambique.
At the time, Kentridge happened to be etching a series of pieces for an exhibition in honour of the centenary of Ubu Rois opening appearance in Parisian theatre. They concerned a naked man in front of a blackboard on which were drawings of Ubu, "with his pointed head and belly spiral". Kentridge intended when the etchings were complete to animate the chalk drawings, which led him to the natural conclusion that the naked man might as well be animated, too. He asked a friend in choreography if she would care to have a dancer in front of screen on which a "schematic line drawing" of Ubu was to move about.
When Kentridge realised that he could not immerse himself in both the Ubu and the Waiting Room projects simultaneously, he panicked and chose to combine the two. When the TRC took off, it became clear that he need look no further in his hunt for material, for "an avalanche" was streaming in every day. While he went about convincing the two parties to come together, he formed an ever-clearer picture of how the two could complement one another. The grave documentary material from the TRC could lend to the rampant burlesque, "which always had a danger of becoming merely amusing", a certain dignity and sobriety, while the untamed liberty which characterised Ubu Roi could shed new light and offer a fresh and lively perspective on the depressing affairs of the TRC.
Looking at the play retrospectively, Kentridge did not feel that its shoddy provenance had maledicted it; rather it had accorded its writer, director and producers a gradually compounding platform on which they could "find pieces of the play, images, literary conceits, changing physical metaphors that we would never have arrived at if we had started from a sober beginning".Kentridge 2007, p. xi.
"There is," wrote Taylor of Ubu Roi and its main character's madness, "a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in the burlesque mode which Jarry invents, there is no place for consequence. While Ubu may be relentless in his political aspirations, and brutal in his personal relations, he apparently has no measurable effect upon those who inhabit the farcical world which he creates around himself. He thus acts out our most childish rages and desires, in which we seek to gratify ourselves at all cost. It is this feature in particular which has informed our own production."Taylor, "Writer's Note 2007," pp. iii-iv.
As she viewed the TRC's proceedings, Taylor was deeply affected by the frequency of the recounted atrocities and the negligence and ignorance with which so many were carried out. She noted that "those perpetrators who seem to have some capacity for remorse, appear to be shocked at observing, as if from the outside, the effect of their behaviour. Others simply show no response at all, so profound is the denial, or the failure of moral imagination."Taylor, "Writer's Note 2007," p. iv. She plucked Ubu from the world of burlesque and action without consequence, and dropped him into one altogether different: "It is as if Cause and Effect are registered through different modes of expression in the play [...]."
Puppetry The play's conception began in earnest with a meeting among Kentridge, and Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, who all agreed in principle to employ Ubu as a vehicle for exploring the TRC. Near the end of 1996, Taylor attended numerous workshops with the Handspring Puppet Company and grew to appreciate the actors' capacities and the style of puppet theatre. Also discussed were such transcendental devices as the three-headed hound and the embrace of various hybrid forms of animation and puppetry: drawn figures were hand-controlled and filmed on a sequential frame-by-frame basis. Taylor later said that her writing was greatly informed not only by Kentridge's direction but also by these experiences,"Further," she wrote, "this theatre company brings a performance style of great expressive care to the characters, an element which has determined what kinds of testimony have been appropriate for inclusion." (Taylor, "Writer's Note 2007", p. vii) and believed that her colleagues were similarly inspired and edified.
Taylor came to see great significance in the figurative role of the puppet, for its every motion was, in essence, tropical:
The puppet draws attention to its own artifice, and we as audience willingly submit ourselves to the ambiguous processes that at once deny and assert the reality of what we watch. Puppets also declare that they are being "spoken through". They thus very poignantly and compellingly capture complex relations of testimony, translation and documentation apparent in the processes of the Commission itself.Taylor, Writer's Note 2007, p. vii.
It was early on in the workshops that the decision was taken as a finality to have Ma and Pa Ubu played by orthodox actors. "These characters thus exist, as it were, on one scale," wrote Taylor. "The witnesses, who are represented by puppet-figures, exist on another scale, and a great deal of their meaning arises out of this fact." Lewis Segal, writing in the Los Angeles Times, declared that the puppets incarnated "a helpless nobility in the face of great suffering", while noting that they represented only "a kind of supplement to a neo-Expressionist theatrical experience that the company defines primarily with human actors and film animation".Segal 1998.
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