Ubu and the Truth Commission

After the triumph of "Refuse the Hour", the great South African director and visual artists, William Kentridge, returns with his masterpiece, “Ubu and the Truth Commission”, a new version of the historic 1997 production, co-produced by the Onassis Stegi in association with the internationally celebrated Handspring Puppet Company. This spectacle of unrivaled skill and peerless aesthetics is simultaneously a political act of memory and reflection.

Actors, puppets and puppeteers, projections of archive footage, recordings of eye-witness accounts and, of course, Kentridge's own uniquely 'primitive' animation share the stage in this imaginative, humanistic happening: a total work of art which tackles Apartheid and racism, collective trauma, historical memory and reconciliation.

The work that sowed the seed for Dada, surrealism and the Theater of the Absurd, Alfred Jarry’s “King Ubu” (1896), is the starting point. It's just that here, the greedy 19th-century anti-hero is beamed down into the South Africa of the 1990s in the form of a fallen oppressor. Guilty of terrible crimes during the Apartheid period, this South African Ubu finds himself facing justice —in this case, the questions of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee formed by Nelson Mandela. And as Ubu waits, hoping for an amnesty, he ploughs the field like a court jester, singing and dancing in the shadow of his wife, a possessive Big Mama Africa, accompanied by a retinue of marionettes, emblems of his autarchic nature: the mythic three-headed Cerberus, guardian of Hades, and a crocodile who devours any documentary evidence that must not see the light of day.