Minnaar set to lay Pa Ubu to rest
Tonight theatre ‘Ubu and the Truth Commission’ returns to The Market after 20 years. speaks to Dawid Minnaar and Busi Zokufa who play Pa and Ma Ubu in this exciting multi-media production
DAWID Minnaar has done a few productions with the Handspring Puppet Company, so he isn’t sure if the world premiere or the national premiere was at the Market almost 20 years ago. But either one will do to complete the circle on this current production of Ubu and the Truth Commission. Directed by William Kentridge and associate Janni Younge, Ubu runs until September 11 in the John Kani Theatre at the Market.
“It feels right,” he says about what he believes will be their last run. “The time has come.” And I reminded him that he didn’t feel that way a few years back with the first few performances of this revitalised production at the National Arts Festival.
He muses about the relevance which, he argues, was super-hot when it was first staged in the ’90s. After all, the Truth Commission was on everybody’s lips. Yet just last week I caught an interview with US social justice lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, who was telling the interviewer that slavery was still an issue because they hadn’t had Truth Commissions like in South Africa. It’s not an issue that is going away soon.
One understands where Minnaar is coming from, but he also knows that the world is in a particular place and that’s why this is a contemporary classic. It’s relevance might be different, but it is still sizzling and sharp.
Those who saw it the first time around will remember that Ubu and the Truth Commission is a strikingly stunning collaboration between Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company. After extensive international touring, this landmark piece of South African theatre is returning to the Market Theatre to entertain and challenge audiences. The production is “laced with dark, sardonic wit, spectacular and disturbing animation and poignant, finely detailed puppetry”, says the publicity material and every word is pitched perfectly.
The performances combine puppetry, live actors, music, animation and documentary footage drawn from the historical archive of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and this is what turns this into such an immersive experience. The combination of all these different media is no less potent than it was two decades ago. The character of Pa Ubu (Minnaar) represents the various instruments of apartheid violence, like the police, assassins, spies and politicians. For Pa Ubu, torture, sex and food are all elements of a single gross appetite. Doesn’t that sound familiar in our upside down world today?
Ma Ubu (Busi Zokufa) misinterprets Pa’s nocturnal absences in this tragic comedy that gives us glimpses into the devastating complexities of that time of horror for most people living in this country. But, says Zokufa, she was terrified and intimidated to play opposite someone like Minnaar in those days. He just raises his eyebrows in disbelief. But no longer, says this now seasoned actress who now knows she is “ripe and ready” as she has spent the last three years travelling the world with this production – and that’s the second time around.
She feels the raison d’être for this second coming is to poke people: “It’s a reminder of the issues raised at the Truth Commission,” she says as they talk about the youth, some of whom aren’t aware of everything that went down at that time.
It still plays with the the themes of reconciliation, repatriation and healing and whether that was achieved. “The first time it was quite tough revisiting all those Truth Commission issues,” she says.
But this is not the cocky Ubu that starts out in the original story. No, says Minnaar: “Read Dawid Minnaar and Busi Zokufa in him as someone on the run, someone on the back foot and with a wife who laments about the time when they had spectacular balls. Their domestic situation has changed, the set feels more like a tent with canvas walls, it’s like an empty castle,” he stresses.
It is rundown, notes Minnaar and it’s almost as if they’re hiding out. “I’m the emperor without clothes, already stripped to my underwear.”
And it is that feeling of deterioration, the dogs yapping at their heels, of someone who knows these are his last glory days, while his partner ignores the world crumbling around her, that is so familiar and so oft repeated around the world as most of us witness in wonderment that those doing wrong topple dramatically time and time again.
This final round is also a homecoming and playing for their people and in a real run in one theatre. All of this counts for the actors.
While this time has kept pretty close to the initial production, Minnaar says the writer has remarked on some changes in his performance 20 years on. They didn’t want to change it now, that would be for another production, they agree.
“It’s such a lovely script and then you add the animation and the puppetry,” explains Minnaar. But if he had to fiddle with Ubu in the future, he would want to extend the farcical elements and drive that to its conclusion.
For now it is all about watching one of our most powerful contemporary classics. Don’t miss it. If ever you ask questions about the quality of local theatre, this is the perfect response.
See review below.