Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by Jane Taylor, directed by William Kentridge
Handspring Puppet Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
April 15-19, 2015
“The Smell of Blood and Gunpowder”
Ubu and the Truth Commission is the second play to be presented as part of Canadian Stage’s Spotlight on South Africa. The play was first performed in 1997, a year after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to hear the testimony of those who committed or were victims of atrocities during apartheid. It is an important work but, intentionally, makes for very uncomfortable viewing. Is it possible to laugh at a play containing such horrific subject matter? No, but it is possible to give that subject matter some sort of context. That is precisely what author Jane Taylor seeks to do, thus using theatre as a means of effecting some sort of reconciliation between the audience and the sickening truth of its past.
To provide a context for atrocities committed during apartheid, the official, brutally enforced segregation of races that lasted in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, Taylor recurs to one of the most famous theatrical embodiments of cowardly brutality and greed, Père Ubu, the title character of the proto-absurdist play Ubu Roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). Taylor has only borrowed two characters from Ubu Roi, Père Ubu and his wife Mère Ubu, and the play’s main plot that Ubu, who has assassinated Poland’s royal family and has usurped the throne, is killing anyone who rebels.
In Ubu and the Truth Commission, Ma Ubu (Busi Zokufa) is concerned that Pa Ubu (Dawid Minnaar) is out every night. She assumes that he is being unfaithful to her with other women. In reality, he is the leader of one of the government’s death squads who goes about killing innocent people and blowing up property. The difference between Taylor’s play and Jarry’s is that Jarry never focusses on Ubu’s victims whereas Taylor does.
During the course of the play’s 90 minutes, Taylor and director William Kentridge mix the acting of Minnaar and Zokufa, on their own and with the puppets, with animated film by Kentridge behind them that depicts Ubu committing his crimes. When Ubu returns home after one of his outings smelling of blood and gunpowder, he mimes taking a shower in a clear glass shower stall while on screen the film shows us skulls, body parts and weapons washing off him. Sometimes, especially near the end, the chalk-like drawings shift suddenly into documentary footage of crime scenes and riots. In one of the most effective scenes of the film, Kentridge has us peer into one window after another to see people being tortured or murdered in various ways, only to pull back his camera to show us that all these activities are happening simultaneously in an enormous building.
Since the serious tone of these scenes instantly negates any of the comedy generated by Minnaar, Zokufa, Brutus or Niles, the only way to understand the play is to recognize that the perpetrators and victims of violence live in different worlds. The first live in a world they and we see portrayed as comic; the second is one that is tragic. When Pa and Ma Ubu sail off into exile at the end, they leave us with the real world their actions have created.
Minnaar, who spends nearly the entire show in his underwear as a sign of Ubu’s infantile nature, gives a tremendously vital performance. Though he is not rotund as Ubu claims to be, he projects just the right mixture of menace and cowardice, fear and glee, that makes Ubu such an iconic figure.
Zokufa as Ma Ubu, dressed in a trailing robe and high pink headpiece, adopts such a strange voice that it is often difficult to understand her words. When she plays a translator, however, or in her long speech on film in whiteface informing on Pa Ubu, she is very easily understood.
The three puppeteers (Gabriel Marchand, Mongi Mthombeni and Maniseli Maseti) are not only expert at manipulating puppets but are also fine actors when they play both victims (not Marchand) or translators. When they translate, they all suggest, sometimes merely with the length of a pause, the emotion the translator has to repress to do his job.
For a comedy Ubu and the Truth Commission is quite depressing. The most comic of Ubu’s scenes is near the end when he is giving testimony to the Commission and the very microphones in front of him try to flee from his mouth so they don’t have to relay his words. On reflection, however, one realizes what a great milestone the play itself is. Here black and white actors are working together to commemorate the victims and satirize the enforcers of apartheid. The play itself is thus a monument to reconciliation.
Although native languages are used along with Afrikaans, the word “apartheid” is never heard nor place names that would lend specificity to the action. By using Jarry’s play as a template, the Handspring Puppet Company has created a work that not only resonates in South Africa but in any of the many countries now where a government in power comes to regard some of its own citizens, because of race or religion, as criminals.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Dawid Minnaar and Busi Zokufa; Mandiseli Maseti, Dawid Minnaar, Gabriel Marchand and Mongi Mthombeni; Mandiseli Maseti. ©2014 Luke Younge.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2015-04-16
Ubu and the Truth Commission