REVIEW | Ubu and the Truth Commission
THEATRE
Ubu and the Truth Commission ★★★★
Heath Ledger Theatre | Review by Ron Banks
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was a farce. Artist-activist William Kentridge and his co-creators from the Handspring Puppet Company clearly think so.
Their inventive slice of theatrical farce — or should that be more absurdist theatre — borrows from 19th century satirist Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Le Roi to present a modernised, hybridised meditation on megalomania, power plays, violence and the gross absurdities of the guilty parties who seek to justify their actions.
Jarry’s original Ubu was a power-crazed king with a terrible bloodlust, who in this modernisation is a general in the South African army brought to give an account of himself before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Pa Ubu, as he is known in this version, is introduced to the audience warring with his wife, a buxom black woman with the same capacity for self-preservation as her husband.
The pair are played by South African actors Dawid Minaar and Busi Zokufa, whose high-octane performances propel the play along at a cracking pace. They share the stage with a variety of puppet characters, from the three-headed dogs of war to small, rather delicate puppets who give voice to the testimonies of real-life apartheid victims called to give their evidence to the TRC.
Writer Jane Taylor has selected a small number of extremely violent verbatim testimonies to insert into the play at various points but personal testimony is not really the point of the play.
Adding to the hybrid nature of the play are the images by artist Kentridge, conveyed in his crude, black-and-white style on a screen behind the actors. Kentridge’s images of violence, chaos and the sense of disorder in South African society further the absurdist intent of its creators.
At first Ubu and the Truth Commission is a clever exercise in image-making, with Ma and Pa Ubu interacting with the puppet figures, clashing with each other and finally working out their own strategies to beat the Truth Commission.
As Pa Ubu shrewdly knows, when called to give evidence before a government inquiry, a guilty person can either choose to conceal or reveal, or to shift the burden of guilt elsewhere. This he prepares to do.
Truth commissions are supposed to be honourable exercises in clearing the air, getting at the truth about who perpetrated violence on whom, and winding up with a comfortable feeling that sins have been forgiven, the mea culpas of the guilty have been confessed and absorbed, and everyone goes away happy.
Well, not in this scenario. The buffoonishly manipulative Pa Ubu and his equally scheming wife sail off — literally, it seems — into the sunset. Has justice been served? Has the whole contraption worked, or collapsed in on itself?
Rarely has political satire and absurdist drama combined so well in a Festival production. The puppets can take a bow but the beating heart of the show is the towering absurdity of Minaar’s Pa Ubu, quite unforgettable in his white singlet, Y-fronts and brown boots.
Ubu and the Truth Commission ends on Saturday.
