UBU AND THE TRUTH COMMISSION : HANDSPRING PUPPET COMPANY

UBU AND THE TRUTH COMMISSION

Ubu and the Truth Commission combines puppetry, performance by live actors, music, animation and documentary footage. The play is based on the hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and on a 19th century licentious slob - Ubu Roi - created in 1888 by the French playwright, Alfred Jarry, when he was still a student. In this production Ubu is a policeman for whom torture, murder, sex and food are all variations of a single gross appetite.

Jane Taylor wrote the script, which includes original testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's hearings.

Director's note | Author's note | Puppeteers' note
Credits | Photo gallery | BACK TO UBU

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
The crocodile's mouth
In South Africa at the moment there is a battle between the paper shredders and the photostat machines. For each police general who is shredding documents of his past there are officers under him who are Photostatting them to keep as insurance against future prosecutions. On stage I wanted to show a shredding machine. But a real machine, noisily and slowly going through reams of paper, did not seem very remarkable. We thought of using a bread slicer on stage as a metaphor, but were daunted by the thought of all that wasted, sliced bread each night. We thought of doing a drawing or animation of the shredding machine, and projecting it on screen, but I baulked at the thought of those hours of drawing the spaghetti trails of shredded paper. Then we thought. We already have three dogs on stage, why not feed the evidence we want to shred, to a dog? But their mouths were too small to swallow a video tape or ream of documents. So we asked, what has a wide enough mouth to swallow whatever we want to hide? Hence the crocodile's mouth.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an enquiry established in terms of the negotiated settlement between the outgoing Nationalist government and the incoming ANC government of South Africa. The brief of the Commission is to examine human rights abuses that occurred in South Africa over the past thirty-five years. There are two parts to this process. Victims and survivors come to the Commission to recount their stories of what happened to them or members of their families (many of those involved did not survive their story and it is left to mothers and brothers to give evidence). The second part of the process is the amnesty hearings in which perpetrators of these abuses may give evidence of what they have done. Their inducement? A full confession can bring amnesty and immunity from prosecution or civil procedures for the crimes committed. Therein lies the central irony of the Commission. As people give more and more evidence of the things they have done they get closer and closer to amnesty and it gets more and more intolerable that these people should be given amnesty.

The Commission itself is theatre, or at any rate a kind of ur-theatre. Its hearings are open to the public, as well as being televised and broadcast on the radio. Many of the hearings are presided over by Archbishop Tutu in full purple magnificence. The hearings move from town to town setting up in a church hall, a school auditorium. In each setting the same set is erected. A table for the witnesses (always at least as high as that of the commissioners so the witnesses never have to look up to the commissioners.) Two or three glass booths for the translators. A large banner hangs on the wall behind the commissioners, TRUTH THROUGH RECONCILIATION. 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 grief which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of a deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position. This theatre rekindles each day the questions of the moment. How to deal with a guilt for the past, a memory of it. It awakes every day the conflict between the desire for retribution and a need for some sort of social reconciliation. Even those people (and there are a lot) who will have nothing to do with the Commission and who are in denial of the truths it is revealing are, in their very strident refusals, joining in the debate.

Both the process of the Commission and material coming out of it have been a source of new theatre being made in South Africa. Three plays have run at the Market theatre complex in Johannesburg that deal with our recent past and the Commission.

But in the face of the strength of the theatre of the Commission, the question arises, how can any of us working in the theatre compete with it? Of course we can't and don't try to. The origin of our work is very different and even if in the end it links directly to the Commission, this is secondary rather than primary. Our theatre is a reflection on the debate rather than the debate itself. It tries to make sense of the memory rather than be the memory.

To go on a fast and brief digression into the origin of this our most recent play Ubu and the Truth Commission: I have for some years been working with the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg making pieces of theatre that combine animation, puppets and actors-not out of some deep aesthetic principle or programme, but rather out of the fact that I make animation, and Handspring make Puppet theatre and we wanted to see what would happen if we combined the two. Some readers may have seen Woyzeck on the Highveld that we performed in 1993. And Faustus in Africa which we performed two years ago. Faustus was a huge undertaking and after it was done the Handspring Puppet Company and I decided to do a minimal production-two actors, maybe one fragment of animation. Something we could do and survive. Waiting for Godot threw itself up as an option. It would work very well for puppets and perhaps only one fragment of animation in the middle when Lucky and Pozzo THINK. But we reckoned without the Beckett fundamentalists who would not give permission for us to leave out even a comma from the stage directions. We then thought how we could find a neo-Becketian text to work with. None of us had the courage or skill to write our own text. We then thought of working with a Found Text: this in the hope of finding in the words that people use to describe extreme situations, a bed rock connection between human experience and the language we use to talk about it. We thought of starting on a project that would gather oral testimonies from land-mine victims waiting in rural orthopaedic hospitals in Angola and Mozambique. This project was called Waiting Room.

At about this time I was working on a series of etchings based on Jarry's Ubu (for an exhibition marking the centenary of the first production of Ubu Roi on stage in Paris. These etchings involved a drawing of a naked man in front of a blackboard. On the blackboard were chalk drawings of Jarry's Ubu with his pointed head and belly spiral. After the etchings were done I wanted to animate the chalk Jarryesque drawings: and then thought that if the chalk drawings were animated, so should the figure in front be. I then asked a choreographer friend if she wanted to do a dance piece using a dancer in front of a screen in which a schematic line drawing of Ubu would be moving. Thus the Ubu project was begun. Panic mounted. I realised I could not do both the Ubu and Waiting Room projects. There were not enough weeks for animation. In desperation I combined the two.

At this time too the first hearings of the Truth Commission began and it rapidly became clear that if we were looking for found texts we had an avalanche of remarkable material arriving every day. Even as I started the process of convincing the participants in the different projects that it made sense to combine them, it became clear that in some ways the contradictory projects-sober documentary material and wild burlesque could make sense together. The material from the Truth Commission could give a gravitas and grounding to Ubu (which always had a danger of becoming merely amusing). At the same time the wildness and openness of Jarry's conception could give us a way of approaching the documentary material in a new way and so enable us all to hear the evidence afresh.

This was the central challenge we started with. Only now, with the production completed and on the stage, can we get any feeling whether the inauthenticity of the origins of the piece has damned it ineluctably or whether in spite of (or as I believe) because of, this strange, only half coherent beginning, were we able to 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. How can we do honour to this material from the Truth Commission? In so far as I have a polemic it is this: to trust in the inauthentic, the contingent, the practical as a way of arriving at meaning. I will elaborate on this later.

A question that arose was how to deal with the witness's stories on the stage - these formed the Found Text of the original project. Quite early on we knew that the witnesses would all be performed by puppets (with the speaking manipulators visible next to them-our usual way of working) and that Ma and Pa Ubu would be played by actors.

There were two routes to this decision. The first as an answer to the ethical question: what is our responsibility to the people whose stories we are using as raw fodder for the play? There seemed to be an awkwardness in getting an actor to play the witnesses - the audience being caught halfway between having to believe in the actor for the sake of the story, and also not believe in the actor for the sake of the actual witness who existed out there but was not the actor. Using a puppet made this contradiction palpable. There is no attempt to make the audience think the wooden puppet or its manipulator is the actual witness. The puppet becomes a medium through which the testimony can be heard.

But it would be false to say that our route to the decision to use puppets for these parts came this way. Rather we knew from the beginning that Pa and Ma Ubu would be human actors as that had been the premise for the first dance/animation conception, and by the same token, we knew that the witnesses would be puppets because that had been the premise of the Waiting Room project. The more honourable route to the decision about performance style, the first 'ethical' route, is a justification after the event.

But the decision brought a whole series of meanings and opportunities in its wake, the most important of which was that witnesses could appear in different corners of Ubu's life, not only at the witness stand as we had originally anticipated. They were also able to generate a whole series of unexpected meanings that became central to the play. For example, we experimented with a scene in which Ubu is lying on a table and above him a puppet witness gives evidence on the death of his child. We tried it first with the witness standing behind Ubu's hips. The body of Ubu became an undulating landscape, a small rise in the ground behind which the witness spoke. We then tried the same scene with the witness behind Ubu's head. Immediately the testimony of the witness became a mere dream of Ubu, the story was taken from the witness and became Ubu's confession. We put the witness behind Ubu's legs again and he was back in the landscape. We then tried to see how close the puppet could get to touching Ubu without breaking the double image. Extremely close we found. And then we tried it with the witness touching Ubu's hip with its wooden hand. An extraordinary thing happened. What we saw was an act of absolution. The witness forgave, even comforted Ubu for his act. These were a series of wholly unexpected meanings, generated not through clarity of thought, or brilliance of invention, but through practical theatre work. This is the second polemic I would make. A faith in a practical epistemology in the theatre-trusting in and using the artifices and techniques of theatre to generate meaning.

It also works in reverse. With the animation dance scene, I had the clear idea of creating a character made up of the live actor in front of the screen and a schematic representation or cartoon of the same character on the screen. Both would be seen together and together would generate the richly complex person. Confidence in this idea gave the strength to begin the project. However, it became clear within twenty minutes of starting this that it would not work. For reasons of synchronisation, parallax, lighting, stilted performance, it became impossible and this central principle was thrown out. Next polemic - Mistrust of Good Ideas in the abstract. Mistrust of starting with a knowledge of the meaning of an image and thinking it can then be executed. There is for me more than an accidental linguistic connection between executing an idea and killing it.

But to go back to the question of the witnesses and their testimonies which is the central question we grappled with in the heart of our play. As I have said our solution was to use puppets. (Even here it was not quite so simple. At first we realised how brilliant was our conception of using puppets because, at the Commission, not only did one have witnesses giving evidence, but one also had a translator of that evidence. Two speakers for the same story and our puppets need two manipulators. One manipulator could tell the story in Zulu and the other could translate. But it did not work. The stories could not be heard. In the end we banished our translators to a glass booth - Ubu's shower - and made a difference between the natural voice of the witness and the artificial public address voice of the translator.)

But there have been other solutions to the question of how to deal with the raw material thrown up by the Truth Commission. As I said earlier, there were two other plays running at the Market theatre that deal with the Truth Commission. The first, The Dead Wait, is a conventional play. It is a fictional reconstruction of an event from the war in Angola, recounting a soldier's return to South Africa and his attempt to make his confession for a crime he committed. Although this play comes out of the context of the Truth Commission, it is not directly about the Commission and its processes.

The other play, The Story I am about to Tell, was made by a support group for survivors who have given evidence before the Commission. It is a play designed to travel around various communities to spread awareness of the Commission and engage people in debate around questions raised by the Commission. Their solution of how to deal with the testimonies of witnesses at the Commission was to have three of the witnesses play themselves. That is, three people who were giving evidence before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission returned each night, and on stage, to give their evidence again. The mother of a lawyer whose head was blown up by a booby trapped walkman describes crawling on her knees into the room where the shattered body and head lay. A man describes three years on death row waiting to be hanged for a crime he did not commit. A woman describes being arrested, interrogated and raped by security police. Their evidence is the central, but not the only element of the play, most of which is set in a taxi full of people going to a Truth Commission hearing. Three professional actors play the bit parts, provide comic interludes, and lead the scripted debates about the Commission and the three 'real' people give their testimony.

And yet it is only a partial solution to the questions raised by the Commission. Because what the 'real' people give is not the evidence itself, but performances of the evidence. There is a huge gap between the testimony at the Commission and its reperformance on stage. And these are not actors. In fact it is their very awkwardness that makes their performances work. One is constantly thrown back, through their awkwardness, into realising these are the actual people who underwent the terrible things they are describing. The most moving moment for me was when one of the survivors (survivor of three years on death row) had a lapse of memory. How could he forget his own story-but of course he was in that moment a performer at a loss for his place in the script. I have no clear solution to the paradoxes this half testimony, half performance raised. But describe it as one of many possible ways of dealing with the material.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was faced with a similar problem of doing justice to the testimonies. There was a divergence between the emotions expressed by the witnesses telling their stories and the version given by the translators. It was felt that so much of the heart of the testimony was lost when it came back through the translators. So for a short while the Commission had the disastrous idea of encouraging the translators to copy the emotions of the witnesses and to perform the emotions in their translations. This was soon stopped.

The question of how to do justice to the stories bedevils all of us trying to work in this terrain. With Ubu and the Truth Commission the task is to get a balance between the burlesque of Pa and Ma Ubu and the quietness of the witnesses. When the play is working at its best, Pa Ubu does not hold back. He tries to colonise the stage and be the sole focus of the audience. And it is the task of the actors and manipulators of the puppets to wrest that attention back. This battle is extremely delicate. If pushed too hard there is the danger of the witnesses becoming strident, pathetic, self pitying. If they retreat too far they are swamped by Ubu. But sometimes, in a good performance, and with a willing audience we do make the witnesses stories clearly heard and also throw them into a wider set of questions that Ubu engenders around them.

It sounds recondite but again I will say that it is only on the stage, in the moment, that one can judge how the material is given its weight. This changes both from performance to performance and from audience to audience.

Purely in the context of my own work I would repeat my trust in the contingent, the inauthentic, the whim, the practical, as strategies for finding meaning. I would repeat my mistrust in the worth of Good Ideas. And state a belief that somewhere between relying on pure chance on the one hand, and the execution of a programme on the other, lies the most uncertain but the most fertile ground for the work we do.

But I have no fixed opinion on which of the three plays I have referred to is the best way to go. I think I have shown that it is not the clear light or reason or even aesthetic sensibility which determines how one works, but a constellation of factors only some of which we can change at will.

Each of the different pieces of theatre I have described can and has had enormous impact on their respective audiences. After one performance of The Story I am about to Tell, a spectator was inconsolable. Her tears were for the stories, but also she said that they were for anger and regret, that never in her life in Munich had there been a similar theatre of testimony. A friend was deeply moved by the Dead Wait, the play about the war in Angola. He had served as a soldier in that war. And after a performance of Ubu and the Truth Commission a woman came up to us, obviously moved by what she had seen. She said she was from Romania. We expressed surprise that the play had been accessible to her as it was so local in its content. 'That's it,' she said. 'It is so local. So local. This play is written about Romania.'

In brief | Author's note | Puppeteers' note
Credits | Photo gallery | BACK TO UBU

JANE TAYLOR
Truths and Reconciliations
In early 1996, almost exactly two years after South Africa's first non-racial national election, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began its work. The Commission had a momentous mandate. It was to solicit South Africans who considered themselves as agents, victims or survivors of human rights violations perpetrated in the apartheid era, to testify before a national forum. The purposes of this process were various: to retrieve lost histories, to make reparation to those who had suffered, to provide amnesty for acts which were demonstrably political in purpose. One of the larger purposes of the Commission is to create a general context through which national reconciliation might be made possible.

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 origins of the project
Ubu and the Truth Commission had several points of origin, some arising out of the Handspring Puppet Company, other projects, and some from William Kentridge. I can only address here where the project began for me. In 1996 1 initiated a series of cultural activities, Fault Lines, which was a programme of events including an art exhibition, poetry readings by writers from South Africa, Germany, Chile, Israel, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, Sudan and Zimbabwe on issues relating to questions of war crimes; reparation, memory and mourning; as well as an academic and arts conference; a student radio project; a community arts initiative, and a workshop for media covering the TRC. My purposes were multiple.

Primarily, I wanted to foreground the role that artists could play in facilitating debates around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Following the premise that artists habitually deal with issues of betrayal, sadism, masochism, memory, I felt that to ignore what the arts could bring to these processes, was to waste an extremely valuable resource. Further, it is my feeling that through the arts some of the difficult and potentially volatile questions, such as why we betray or abuse each other, could be addressed without destabilising the fragile legal and political process of the TRC itself.

Alfred Jarry and his Ubu
The beginnings of the original Ubu have attained the status of legend within French theatre culture. At the age of fifteen, in 1888, Alfred Jarry used a short satire written by his friend, Henri Morin, which depicted their science teacher as king of Poland. Jarry's piece was conceived as a play for marionettes. The first public performance in Paris of a reworked version, now the fully fledged Ubu Roi, took place some eight years later. The riot which broke out in the theatre after this performance is a stock element of Jarry biographia. It is, however, worth noting that neither of the sequel Ubu plays, Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu Enchanted, was performed during the writer's brief 34-year life.

Ubu Roi follows the political, military, and criminal exploits of the grandiose and rapacious Ubu, a kind of parodic Macbeth who, together with his wife, attempts to seize all power for himself. The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification. The play is full of scatological jokes, and the famous opening line of the play ('Merde!'/'Shit!') was no doubt part responsible for the vigour of French public response of the opening night. Ubu's weapons are a pshittasword and a pshittashook, and his sceptre is by tradition a lavatory brush, a stage prop which you will see appear in our production. Characters in the play are named, variously, MacNure, Pissweet and Pissale; and at one point Ubu thrusts his conscience down the toilet. There is 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.

Ubu in South Aftica
In Ubu and the Triith Commission I have taken this figure, and have characterized him using a style of burlesque derived in part from Jarry. The language is in ways deliberately archaic in order to situate Ubu as an anachronism, a figure who lives within a world of remote forms and meanings. This character is then placed within a new dispensation, the world of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

Rather than represent any particular figure from South African history, Ubu stands for an aspect, a tendency, an excuse. Nonetheless, he does at times speak in voices reminiscent of those we have heard in South Africa during the TRC hearings. I have then set his linguistic world against the languages arising from the actual testimony which has emerged out of the Truth and Reconciliation process. The testimony is drawn from the hearings which have given us access to the stories of both survivors and perpetrators of atrocities committed during the Apartheid era. Over the past eighteen months of listening to the disjuncture between the testimony of those looking for amnesty and those seeking reparation, it has been chilling to note the frequency with which an act of astonishing cruelty has been undertaken, as it were, negligently, with no sense of the impact of such actions on other human lives; when confronted with the families of victims or survivors, 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. Our purpose, in this play, was to take the Ubu-character out of the burlesque context, and place him within a domain in which actions do have consequences. 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 as if Cause and Effect are registered through different modes of expression in the play; this carries through into the performance styles which have been used.

This structure, of Ubu meeting the TRC, gives our play its meaning. Obviously, there are very specific theatrical results. 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. The TRC is unquestionably a monumental process, the consequences of which will take years to unravel. For all its pervasive weight, however, it infiltrates our culture asymmetrically, unevenly across multiple sectors. Its place in small rural communities, for example, when it establishes itself in a local church hall, and absorbs substantial numbers of the population, is very different from its situation in large urban centres, where its presence is marginalised by other social and economic activities.

Much of the information that most of us receive on the TRC is communicated via the media between commercial slots, sit-coms, magazine programmes, and so forth. We are called upon to respond with outrage, sympathy, or wonder, within a context that inculcates bewilderment and dislocation. Given our information overload, it is not so easy to sustain unambiguous feelings of moral outrage, even while we might sustain internal sensation of indeterminate sadness. There is thus, I suppose, a sense of ambiguity produced by the play. This is not an ambiguity about the experiences of loss and pain suffered; rather, it is an ambiguity about how we respond to such 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.

This raises the question of dramatic structure. Ubu and the Truth Commission, as the title suggests, has Ubu as its central protagonist, and it sets the Commission against this individual. Our agent is thus, in a sense, an agent of evil. Why have we made this choice? Much of world literature has done the same. Even Milton, in Paradise Lost, finds himself as 'of the devil's party', so to speak. Narrative depends upon agency; the stories of those who 'do' are generally more compelling than those who are 'done to'. This is then one reason for our choice. Another has been determined by the nature of the Commission itself, which has cast those who are victims as the central protagonists of the human rights hearings. The stories we hear are, over and over, those of apparent bystanders who assert their unwarranted suffering. This is at one level appropriate, but as a result we tend not to hear about people who could be characterised as 'knowing participants' in a political war. The stories which we hear do not emphasize the accounts of those opponents of apartheid who were resourceful, energetic, resilient political activists. People are recast within the logics of mourning, and become inexplicable casualties of meaningless violence.

There is no doubt another reason why the Ubu-like perpetrator became our protagonist: 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.

Thus while the TRC has had the two-fold purpose of documenting the cases of victims and of hearing the amnesty applications of perpetrators, it effectively has also been instrumental in creating a context for interrogating how and why such human rights abuses could occur. 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.

The Writing Process
The first phase was a discussion with William Kentridge, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, in which we agreed in principle about using Ubu to explore the TRC. At the end of 1996 we then had a series of workshops with the Handspring Puppet Company performers, during which period I got some sense of the actor's capacities, and was introduced to the basic style of performance of the puppets. During these workshops we also discussed some of the non-naturalistic elements which might be introduced, such as the three-headed dog. We engaged in a very free process of experimenting with new hybrid forms, somewhere between animation and puppetry, in which drawn figures were manipulated by hand, and then filmed frame by frame as a sequence of individual drawings, rather like the technique used for more conventional animation.

Through these various workshops, those involved in the processes developed an increasing sense of the possibilities of the forms we were evolving. My writing emerged very much out of these explorations. One of the great advantages of working with Handspring Puppet Company has been its own experiments in non-naturalistic idioms, which allowed us creative freedom, notwithstanding the weighty documentary imperatives of the TRC itself.

Through the workshops we determined that Pa and Ma Ubu would be played by live actors with no puppet equivalents. These characters thus exist, as it were, on one scale. The witnesses, who are represented by puppet-figures, exist on another scale, and a great deal of their meaning arises out of this fact. Puppets can provide an extraordinary dimension to a theatrical project of this kind, because every gesture, is as it were, metaphorized. The puppet draws attention to its own artifice, and we as audience willingly submit ourselves to the ambiguous processes that at once deny and assert the reality of what we watch. Puppets also declare that they are being 'spoken through'. They thus very poignantly and compellingly capture complex relations of testimony, translation and documentation apparent in the processes of the Commission itself.

Other puppet figures in the play allude in part to elements from Jarry. In Ubu Cocu, the sequel to Ubu Roi, for example, he has three diabolical agents, the Palcontents, who serve Ubu's manic acts of mayhem. These characters are invoked through the three-headed dog that in Ubu and the Truth Commission acts as an instrument of death and destruction.

Many of the writing choices which I have made have been contingent upon other factors, such as the particular animation styles used by William Kentridge, as well as the sophisticated puppeteering technologies of the Handspring Puppet Company. Further, this theatre company brings a performance style of great expressive care to the characters, an element which has determined what kinds of testimony have been appropriate for inclusion.

Of the nineteen Truth Commissions held internationally, South Africa's is apparently the first to have public hearings. In this sense, our case is exceptional. However, in other terms Ubu and the Truth Commission does not explore a uniquely South African story. 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.

In brief | Director's note | Puppeteers' note
Credits | Photo gallery | BACK TO UBU

BASIL JONES AND ADRIAN KOHLER
The puppets were developed in response to the project's needs. Now, reviewing what was a fairly organic process, we can see that three types of puppet were used. Each has a particular relationship to Ma and Pa Ubu, the only two human characters in the play. So firstly, we have the vulture, secondly the dog and crocodile, and thirdly the witness puppets.

The vulture acts as a single chorus, providing sardonic commentary throughout the action of the play. It has a limited range of actions and a set of electronic squawks interpreted on the screen as proverbs. Thus it is a form of manipulation: like gears driven by motors which in turn are driven by a remote technician - which is appropriate to its function in the play - an apparently authorless automaton spewing forth programmed truisms.

Higher up the evolutionary scale are Brutus, the three-headed dog (with three visible manipulators) and Niles, the crocodile (with one visible manipulator). They move about in the same space as Pa and Ma Ubu and are not restricted to traditional puppet playboards such as were used in Woyzeck on the Highveld. The crocodile is Ma Ubu's handbag, but also Pa Ubu's pet advisor and cover-up man, using his big mouth as the shredder of Ubu's evidence.

The dog Brutus is Ubu's henchman. When he goes out to do his evil work, it is the dog who does it with him. Their culpability is indivisible. As such, the dog's three characters, foot soldier, general and politician, share a single body made out of an old briefcase given by Braam Fischer to Sydney Kentridge.

Both of these characters are essentially puppets and it would be difficult to imagine how their roles could be played by human actors. For example, the crocodile has a mouth that can swallow fairly large objects and its belly is a large canvas bag (once the kit bag of Basil Jones' father when on military service in North Africa) for storing them. Here they are easily accessible for discovery by Ma Ubu. The single body of the dogs is a suitcase: an ideal place for Pa Ubu to plant incriminating evidence when the time comes for him to distance himself from their actions.

The final category of puppet is the witnesses. Their responsibility in the play is both central and extremely onerous, as their task is to re-enact the deeply harrowing personal accounts of the effect of the former Apartheid State on people's lives. Badly handled, such stories could easily become a kind of horror pornography. The puppets assist in mediating this horror. They are not actors playing a role. Rather, they are wooden dolls attempting to be real people. As they attempt to move and breathe as we do, they cross the barrier of the here and now and become metaphors for humanity. In this case, two puppeteers manipulate one puppet. The manipulators, working in concert, split and somehow reduce their individual responsibility for the puppet's actions and the puppet's speech. This encourages us to enter into the illusion that the puppet has a life and responsibility of its own. But the fact that the manipulators are present also allows us to use the emotions visible in the puppeteers' faces to inform our understanding of the emotions of the puppet character, with its immobile features.

The two presences supporting the puppet on either side give it a degree of symbolic vulnerability, and at the same time recall the people who comfort witnesses during TRC hearings. Puppets are brought to life by the conviction of the puppeteer and the willingness of the audience. When an actor plays opposite a puppet, she or he participates in the same process. There can be no eye contact with the puppeteer. The actor's focus is solely on the puppet itself. Puppet movement, particularly that of the witnesses, needs to find its correct speed. This is generally slower than the human equivalent to allow the audience to observe clearly what the figure is trying to do, whether it is an arm gesture, the turning of a head, or the picking up or placing of an object by the figure. Working with a particular figure will enable the puppeteer to determine its puppet speed. Moments of physical touching between actor and puppet are carefully worked out. The difference between the materials of which a puppet is made and human flesh can break the illusion that both exist in the same moment.

The main parts of the puppets are made of wood. The rough carving ensures that the puppets' faces have a surface well-keyed for illumination. Therefore, under the lights, the movement of tiny shadows cast by the gouging chisel, particularly the contrast between looking up, looking forward and looking down, assists the illusion of changing expressions on an otherwise immobile face.

These wooden dolls attempting to be people are never seen by Ma and Pa Ubu, though their actions impact fundamentally on their lives. Though they occupy the same space, using the same furniture behind which to perform, they appear to be somewhere else. The Ubus eat the goods they loot from the Spaza shop, but cannot see the shopkeeper, who in turn cannot see them. This division between the human clowns and the puppets, mirrors the era of trauma the play describes.

In brief | Director's note | Author's note
Credits | Photo gallery | BACK TO UBU

Director: William Kentridge
Writer: Jane Taylor
Pa Ubu: Dawid Minnaar
Ma Ubu: Busi Zokufa
Puppet characters: Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler, Louis Seboko, Busi Zokufa
Stage manager and video operator: Bruce Koch
Sound technician: Simon Mahoney
Company and tour manager: Wesley France
Animation: William Kentridge
Assistant animators: Tau Qwelane, Suzie Gable
Choreography: Robin Orlin
Puppet master: Adrian Kohler
Assistant puppet maker: Tau Qwelane
Music: Warrick Sony, Brendan Jury
TRC research: Antjie Krog
Lighting design: Wesley France
Sound design: Wilbert Schubel
Film editor: Catherine Meyburgh
Film and video research: Gail Behrmann
Costumes: Adrian Kohler, Sue Steele
Set design: William Kentridge, Adrian Kohler
Production coordinator: Basil Jones
Production: Art Bureau (Munich), Kunstfest (Weimar), Migros Kulturprozent (Switzerland), Nieders�chsisches Staatstheater Hannover, The Standard Bank National Arts Festival, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology and the Market Theatre Foundation.

In brief | Director's note | Author's note
Puppeteers' note | Photo gallery | BACK TO UBU

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In brief | Director's note | Author's note
Puppeteers' note | Credits | BACK TO UBU