Ubu and The Truth Commission - Protagonist

Protagonist

Of her main character and his role in the play, Taylor writes,

Ubu's story is, at one level, a singular story of individual pathology; yet it is at the same time an exemplary account of the relationships between capitalist ideology, imperialism, race, class, and gender, religion and modernisation in the southern African sub-region.

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. Set against the TRC, "ur agent is thus, in a sense, an agent of evil." Taylor justifies this with literary precedents like Paradise Lost, where John Milton, in William Blake's famous phrase, finds himself "of the Devils party", her belief that "arrative depends on agency; the stories of those who 'do' are generally more compelling than those who are 'done to'", and the nature of the TRC itself, which cast the victims as protagonists and gave little emphasis to other players.

There was also, according to Taylor, another reason: "he provoked us. He is familiar but wholly foreign, he is both human and inhuman. He is the limit term which was used to keep an entire system of meaning in place, from its most extreme to its most banal." "You may not sympathize with the character," wrote Triplett, "but in the end you don't hate him either; instead you are left with the feeling that reconciliation just might be possible."

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". Ubu does not represent any particular figure in South African history; rather, he is "an aspect, a tendency, an excuse". Often, though, he speaks in voices reminiscent of those sounded at the TRC, his language set against its languages. 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. Ubu is confronted within his own home by those whom he has assaulted.

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. My responses now are perhaps more complex than they were then.

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." Her play, then, sought to reproduce the ambiguous nature of response to suffering:

Our own reactions are questioned, because, after all, what is it in us that makes us seek out the stories of another's grief? Or, even more problematically, what makes us follow the stories of the torturers? We follow Ubu's history, are drawn into his family drama, are confronted with his logics of self-justification. We as audience are also implicated because we laugh at his sometimes absurd antics, and this very laughter accuses us.

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'. We are, it seems, increasingly aware of the obligation to hear testimony, even while we may yet be determining how to act upon what we have heard." 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. Like Americans during the Clinton scandals, for instance, Mrs. Ubu (Busi Zokufa) fixates on accusations of sexual excess, not imagining that her lord and master might be committing bigger crimes; when she learns the truth, she immediately turns those crimes into media gold.