Taking South Africa's Political Story To The World

The original Ubu Roi, on which Ubu And The Truth Commission models its main character, is a French play by 19th Century playwright Alfred Jarry about an extravagant tyrant who wallows in greed and self-gratification. The newer play combines this character with a collection of original witness testimonies delivered to the South African Truth Commission in the wake of the demolition of Apartheid.

“When the two came together, there was a lot of concern,” admits Younge. “Is the burlesque and gigantic nature of this character going to completely overwhelm the vulnerability and naturalism of those real testimonies from the Truth Commission? But what everybody found was that it didn’t do that; that it rather worked as a foil. It really shows the honesty and the sincerity of those personal revelations as contrasted to this larger than life character. Ubu is really powerful, and he moves around the whole stage with this big physical performance, while the witnesses are really fragile and contained. It created a very nice contrast between the two types. There’s the big manipulative political power play that was going on at the time, and continues to go on in South Africa and many other countries in the world. And then there are the people, the actual people, who encounter the effects of those actions, and it’s quite a different world! So in a way those two worlds came together and created something that’s very complex and yet was very sensitive to what was going on politically at the time.”

While the production is specifically about South Africa, Younge is constantly surprised at the universality of the themes. “It’s astounding to take this show to a place like Columbia and see people going, ‘This is our story.’ People owning it as part of their own history. Pretty much everywhere we’ve gone there have been people who have the feeling that this is the process that they need to go through, that they could have gone through, and that they’ve had these exact characters in their history.”

"It’s astounding to take this show to a place like Columbia and see people going, ‘This is our story.'"

Younge has directed this latest incarnation of Ubu And The Truth Commission on behalf of William Kentridge, who first directed the play, staged by the Handspring Puppet Company in 1997. It’s very much a revival of Kentridge’s original work, true to its original form, with the original actors. “William described how he was working on a Waiting For Godot and, at the same time, they were hoping to place in something to do with the South African context of the Truth Commission, and at the same time, he was working on an Ubu dance performance piece… And he describes how he ran out of time and squished the two pieces together. I love that – it’s part of the happy evolution of the arts. You come up with concepts and ideas and you get into a thing and somehow the art forces back onto its creators its own world.”