Ubu and The Truth Commission - Conception, Production and Performance

Conception, Production and Performance

Kentridge had been working for some years with the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg before the idea for Ubu and the Truth Commission was mooted, and had extensive experience of theatre that incorporated animation, puppets and actors. He did not, he claimed, pursue the multimedia realm because of any aesthetic ideal, but rather because he was skilled in the art of animation anyway and was curious to see how it would combine with puppet theatre. Woyzeck on the Highveld (1993) and, more notably, Faustus in Africa (1996) were successful tone-setters in this respect. The latter, according to Kentridge, was "a huge undertaking", after which he and the company were on the look-out merely for something small to "do and survive". Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot seemed ideally suited to puppetry, "ut we reckoned without the Beckett fundamentalists who would not give permission for us to leave out even a comma from the stage directions". In a bid to secure a neo-Becketian text (but not having the skill to write their own), and after rejecting several ideas, they considered a project called Waiting Room, which would comprise interviews with land-mine victims waiting in rural orthopaedic hospitals in Angola and Mozambique.

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. They concerned a naked man in front of a blackboard on which were drawings of Ubu, "with his pointed head and belly spiral". Kentridge intended when the etchings were complete to animate the chalk drawings, which led him to the natural conclusion that the naked man might as well be animated, too. He asked a friend in choreography if she would care to have a dancer in front of screen on which a "schematic line drawing" of Ubu was to move about.

When Kentridge realised that he could not immerse himself in both the Ubu and the Waiting Room projects simultaneously, he panicked and chose to combine the two. When the TRC took off, it became clear that he need look no further in his hunt for material, for "an avalanche" was streaming in every day. While he went about convincing the two parties to come together, he formed an ever-clearer picture of how the two could complement one another. The grave documentary material from the TRC could lend to the rampant burlesque, "which always had a danger of becoming merely amusing", a certain dignity and sobriety, while the untamed liberty which characterised Ubu Roi could shed new light and offer a fresh and lively perspective on the depressing affairs of the TRC.

Looking at the play retrospectively, Kentridge did not feel that its shoddy provenance had maledicted it; rather it had accorded its writer, director and producers a gradually compounding platform on which they could "find pieces of the play, images, literary conceits, changing physical metaphors that we would never have arrived at if we had started from a sober beginning".

"There is," wrote Taylor of Ubu Roi and its main character's madness, "a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in the burlesque mode which Jarry invents, there is no place for consequence. 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. He thus acts out our most childish rages and desires, in which we seek to gratify ourselves at all cost. It is this feature in particular which has informed our own production."

Deeply affected as she viewed the TRC's proceedings by the frequency of the atrocities and the negligence and ignorance with which so many of them were carried out, Taylor noted that "those perpetrators who seem to have some capacity for remorse, appear to be shocked at observing, as if from the outside, the effect of their behaviour. Others simply show no response at all, so profound is the denial, or the failure of moral imagination." It was thus her endeavour to pluck Ubu from the world of burlesque and action without consequence, and drop him in one altogether different: "It is as if Cause and Effect are registered through different modes of expression in the play ."