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.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 1996 with what Taylor described as a "momentous mandate", to solicit testimony from those who considered themselves 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 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."
Read more about this topic: Ubu And The Truth Commission