For six months the commission had listened to the voices of victims. The first narrative cut into the country … [but] there can be no story without the balance of the antagonist. The ear and heart simply cannot hold head above a one-way flood. Why would one want the truth if the truth has turned its back; why would one confess before commissioners with as little power as oneself?”
These are the words of poet Antjie Krog, penned during the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They are a response to the voices of both the victims and perpetrators of evil. Yet they speak as eloquently about the transgression of boundaries between the public and personal, and about a trauma that transcends the politics of time and place.
It is these intersections that inspired Jane Taylor to write the script for Ubu and the Truth Commission – the undisputed highlight of this year’s Standard Bank Festival in Grahamstown. Directed by William Kentridge, the production has emerged from an exhibition of Kentridge, Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell – also on display at the Festival. Presented with a combination of projected animation, documentary footage, actors and puppets, it constitutes the third collaboration between Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company, with choreography by Robyn Orlin.
It is based on the scandalous character created by surrealist poet Alfred Jarry more than 100 years ago. First introduced to French audiences with an unforgettable “Merde [shit]!” Ubu has since come to personify human greed and ignorance. He has become an uncomfortably familiar historical figure – the corrupted everyman – and in many respects the epitome of what writer Hannah Arendt describes as the “banality of evil”. He has been, variously, Nero, Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and the corporate fat cat. To South Africans – agonisingly familiar with the mundane forms that evil assumes – he could just as easily be Eugene de Kock, a politician or a power-drunk bureaucrat.
But Ubu and the Truth Commission is more than just a dramatisation and adaptation of evil in a contemporary South African context. It also explores the ability of art to move within the worlds of tragedy and trauma and, through its powers of reinvention, to help a brutalised society still enmeshed in the humdrum of horror to emerge with a sense of hope
For Taylor, who scripted the production a year ago, the truth commission was instrumental in giving horror a human face.
“When I first started following the testimony of the victims it became evident how the TRC processes have destabilised the populist horizon between the individual and the public,” she recalled, during an interview in Germany, where Ubu is currently touring before returning to South Africa for the Festival.
An acclaimed author and lecturer in comparative studies at the University of the Western Cape, Taylor has long been a powerful voice on the interdisciplinary cultural front, particularly since the 1980s. During that era, she recalls, it was not simply apartheid that forced the individual to abdicate personal morality. Among cultural activists, collective responsibility also sat heavily on the back of individualism.
“But since 1994, there has been a shift from the notion of the subjective as an inherently bourgeois concept and an acknowledgement that there can be no respect for civilised society without respect for the individual,” she says. “This has been brought home by the testimonies at the commission, and is something we have tried to convey through the production.” She adds: “I was astounded by the personal metaphors that the victims used in giving accounts of their stories and the languages people used to reinhabit memory, with certain moments emerging sharply and others becoming blurred or completely erased.”
Jarry’s original Ubu wanders within a conscienceless domain where acts are unjustified by cause and unpunished by effect. In Kentridge’s production, he initially inhabits that world but is forced to confront the consequences of his actions through the testimony of his victims. Significantly, Ubu (played by Dawid Minnaar) is the only “non-puppet” character in the production. But he remains attached (both literally and metaphorically) to his victims, who are portrayed as human-sized puppets.
Yet Minnaar’s Ubu is difficult to pin down. He is not an entirely reviled character. Like South Africa’s “prime evil”, Eugene de Kock, he seems at times to colonise the terrain of both perpetrator and victim. “One can’t trust one’s own responses to Ubu,” explains Taylor.
The responses evoked by the testimony of his victims, while equally uncomfortable, are less ambivalent. Unlike puppets employed in many other theatrical or therapeutic contexts, Ubu’s victims do not play a mediative, distancing role. Instead they strike in the place where a laugh and a gasp are indistinguishable.
Taylor describes the audience response as nothing less than cathartic. In fact, after one performance, a tearful Romanian refugee described Ubu and the Truth Commission as “the story of Romania”.
Yet Taylor insists that Ubu does not suggest that historically everyone is equally guilty simply by association. In every situation of evil there are degrees of culpability. And in Ubu there are many guilt lines.
“Injustice brings such as enormous cost to a nation’s well-being,” says Taylor. “Art deals with these issues perennially and is able to move within and between the undefined spaces that make up these traumas.” She adds: “I do not advocate the role of art as an instrument of reconciliation, at the expense of truth, for that would make it simply a form of agitprop. Rather, I see it as a means of reinvention, and through that, transformation.”