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.
[3]The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 1996 with what Taylor described as a "momentous mandate",[4] to solicit testimony from those who identified as casualties, perpetrators, or survivors of the apartheid atrocity.
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.
"[5] 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).
At the time, Kentridge happened to be etching a series of pieces for an exhibition in honour of the centenary of Ubu Roi's opening appearance in Parisian theatre.
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.
"[10] 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.
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.
"[12] 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".
[13] In tackling the matter of how to portray TRC testimonials on stage, the first question was, according to Kentridge, an ethical one:[14] "what is our responsibility to the people whose stories we are using as raw fodder for the play?
"[16] Jones and Kohler, head puppeteers alongside Louis Seboko, elaborated: Their responsibility in the play is both central and extremely onerous, as their task is to re-enact the deeply harrowing personal accounts of the effect of the former Apartheid State on people's lives.
"The plain wooden faces of these characters -- handled with enormous skill by Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler and Louis Seboko -- confer a power and credibility on their words that real actors could never achieve," wrote critic William Triplett.
"[19] The company was especially pleased with the decision to use witness-puppets because the commission often had a translator to accompany each testifier: "Two speakers for the same story and our puppets need two manipulators," as Kentridge put it.
But sometimes, in a good performance, and with a willing audience we do make the witnesses stories clearly heard and also throw them into a wider set of questions that Ubu engenders around them.
Both the dancer and the image were to be seen together, generating an elaborate figure, but it became obvious within twenty minutes of starting the project that, "[f]or reasons of synchronisation, parallax, lighting, [and] stilted performance", it was incompatible.
"[20] Throughout the play, and specifically when Ubu feels insecure about being found out, an animated eye, intercut with a real one in classic Kentridge fashion, emerges on the screen to convey the sense that the main character is not quite so alone as he would like to think.
The vulture, limited in its actions, was placed near the rear of the stage, where sporadically it offered sardonic aphorisms through a series of electronically contrived squawks that were translated on the screen behind it.
Similarly, the crocodile's belly was a canvas kit bag previously the possession of Basil Jones's father during military service in North Africa.
"When [...] Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler and Louis Seboko hold the hands of the puppet characters in some of the most intense moments of 'Ubu and the Truth Commission,'" wrote Segal, "it seems as much an act of consolation as the method by which the large, carved doll-figures are made to gesture.
[26]Nevertheless, Ubu retains in this play the antihero status first accorded him in Jarry's: he is a greedy, sadistic, homicidal, esurient, licentious apartheid police officer.
"[27] Taylor justifies this with literary precedents like Paradise Lost, where John Milton, in William Blake's famous phrase, finds himself "of the Devils [sic] party",[28] her belief that "[n]arrative depends on agency; the stories of those who 'do' are generally more compelling than those who are 'done to'",[26] and the nature of the TRC itself, which cast the victims as protagonists and gave little emphasis to other players.
"[19] Although the play appropriates Jarry's agonist to the context of the TRC, it retains his archaic language and original slang, anachronising him as "a figure who lives within a world of remote forms and meanings".
As Taylor observes, The archaic and artificial language which Ubu uses, with its rhymes, its puns, its bombast and its profanities, is set against the detailed and careful descriptions of the witness accounts which have been, in large measure, transcribed from TRC hearings.
[26]It is the structure of the play, according to its writer, merging Ubu legend with the ongoing Truth Commission, that gives it its meaning, with patent theatrical consequences: Perhaps most evidently, we are automatically taking on the burden of the farcical genre which Jarry used.
I remember having lengthy debates, with a student, about the ethics of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and whether one could ever explore human rights abuses through a burlesque idiom.
[27]Taylor also noted that, in modern times of vast informational overloading, it was difficult always to respond, as expected, "with outrage, sympathy, or wonder, within a context that inculcates bewilderment and dislocation.
[27]While its focus is obviously South African, its application, according to Taylor, is broad in scope: "We in the late twentieth century live in an era of singular attention to questions of war crimes, reparations, global 'peace-keeping'.
"[12] Segal agreed: Although the work should be a jolt for many Africa-watchers – offering a portrait of post-apartheid Mandela-land as anything but the best of all possible worlds – its key issues resonate far from that continent.
By turns chilling and hilarious, brutal and forgiving, the show casts a surreal light on the heart of darkness – and still manages to leave you with hope [...].
[30] General production values, too, were lauded: "The dynamic sound, by Wilbert Schubel, is as complex as the entire range of emotions spanned by the show.