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the work of William kentridge rory bester S outh Africa's T ruth and Reconciliation Commission ( T R C ) has traveled the country soliciting oral testimonies from perpetrators and survivors of Apartheid-era political injustice. Running on the payoff line " T ruth, the Road to Reconciliation," the Commission has attempted to paint a " true" picture of the history of political oppression in South Africa and thereby contribute to the reconciliation of a society polarized by racial prejudice. Promises of reparations to victims and amnesty to agents of apartheid have been the incentives for giving evidence at the public hearings. T he personalized accounts of victimization were heard in anticipation of the first amnesty applications, but while the oral accounts of human rights violations posed many questions, the amnesty applications have provided only a few of the answers . T he expectation that preceded these admissions of guilt has become an anger that the price of confession is freedom from prosecution . F lawed as it is, though, the T R C process is an important mechanism that, in allowing individuals and communities a space to articulate experiences of oppression , has attempted to ensure that the history of apartheid remains part of (at least the archival) consciousness of the South Africa nation. For William K entridge the T R C testimonies " are by far the most powerful material around at the moment." T hese narratives of violence and violation that were as one of the inspirations for Ubu and the Truth Commission, the third co-production (after Woy^eckon the Highveld'm. 1992 and Faustus in Africa in 1995) between K entridge and the Handspring Puppet Company, and the latest in a long line of work that has seen K entridge move between drawings, documentaries, animated films and theatre productions. Ubu and the T ruth Commission is about " taking stock of the country and how we got here," says K entridge. Written by Jane T aylor and directed by K entridge, the play takes Alfred J arry's Ubu, the late-nineteenth-century image and vision of boorish power-mongering and recontextualizes him in late-twentiethcentury South Africa as a B oer-ish, guiltridden agent of the State running from the T ruth and Reconciliation Commission. K entridge wanted to capture the freedom and looseness of J arry's original play, a quality that becomes realized in the clumsiness, brutality and bravado of the principal character , Pa Ubu: " We wanted to see Ubu in a new way - the baffoon but at a cost," says K entridge. Rather than being a calculating operative or an archetype of prime evil, Pa Ubu is meant to be a 'dirty tricks' middleman dressed only in a too-tight vest and baggy underpants. His wife, Ma Ubu, strapped into a corset, struts around using her silk dressing gown and fluffy slippers to dramatic effect. She wro ngly suspects her husband's affair with the State to be a series of sexual infidelities . T his marital intercourse is interspersed with various sequences of puppetry, including the testimonies of witnesses, the degenerate thuggery of a three-headed dog, and the wise words of a vulture waiting for political carrion. Pa Ubu's character is a sad stereotype of the interrogator, quite unlike many of the men seeking amnesty for their manipulative cunning and ingenuity. Ubu's archaic language , while serving to locate the character in the 'old' system, only reduces him to the stereotype of a bumbling simpleton. T he production itself is too styled to give any real sense of the clumsy, makeshift solutions to which security and intelligence officers resorted to in order to secure information and dispose of their victims. T here is a craziness and freneticism about taking ordinary, everyday objects such as tyre tubes and transforming them into instruments of violence , a banality behind the callousness of their torture and murder, that is undermined by the theatrical elegance of the play's choreography. T he play does not produce the astonishing bewilderment one experiences watching Sunday night T R C special reports on public television, nor the particular kind of dis-comfort/ease that we, as white South Africans, feel when listening to these T...

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