The changing face of Ma Ubu

Ubu and the Truth Commission

Ubu and the Truth Commission, like Gielgud's Hamlet, is one of those theatrical legends that I thought I had missed.  Originally created in 1997, in the thick of the South African transition, it came to LIFT in 1999, but I somehow failed to get there.  Since then, I have read and heard so much about this extraordinary performance, and even taught students about it, that it was hugely exciting to hear that it was being revived, with the original two leading actors, and coming to the Print Room.  I was not disappointed. 

When William Kentridge's earlier piece with Handspring, Woyzeck on the Highveldt, came to the Barbican in 2011, a lot of people felt that it had "dated", that its style was somehow outmoded.  I didn't feel this - and Ubu seemed to me every bit as much of the now.  In some ways this may sound a bit odd - because the play is so very much about the specific political moment of the Truth Commission, and responds to the hugely challenging questions around justice, reparation, reconciliation and nation-building that it raised.  South Africa likes to tell us that it has moved on: it is rather in the nature of Truth and Reconciliation processes that they encourage a "moving on" once they are complete.  But, as Rustom argues in his book on Terror and Performance, without some kind of reparation, a Truth Commission may in fact have exactly the opposite effect - it can reveal the injustice without setting it right.  As William Kentridge himself has said of the South African TRC: "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."

In the programme for this revival, the writer Jane Taylor discusses the question put to her and Kentridge by a South African artist after its early performances: "Why have you not updated the play?"  Her response, which I find persuasive, is that "The pragmatic reality of inventing a viable post-apartheid country have shifted us away from the almost allegorical textures of the Commission and its purposes....  The play and its textures arise from the immediacy of the events: the play was made somehow 'inside' the epoch of the Commission.  A rewriting would falsify the uncertain balancing that captures the particular moment of precarious anticipation."   So the revival becomes an opportunity to look back - a deliberate viewing of a specific moment from the perspective of the changed present. 

However, the production is not exactly as it was in 1997.  For one thing, the leading performers, Dawid Minnaar and Busi Zokufa, are older than they were.  Like the audience, they are viewing the troubled birth of the new South Africa from a different, more distant perspective.  And, perhaps related to that, Busi Zokufa's Ma Ubu no longer has a white face.  

These two images, the top one of the current revival, the bottom one of the original show, make the point very clearly.  In the 2015 version, Ma Ubu wore white make-up only for the scene in which she appeared as a projected image, doing her TV interview.  In the original staging, the role was played entirely in white-face.  This was much discussed at the time - with many commentators saying she epitomised the Afrikaaner women who became obsessed by their own sensory comforts while their menfolk committed the worst crimes of apartheid.  If this was what the character signified, then her portrayal by a black actor in white-face made this performance an explicit commentary on such women from a black perspective.  However, to my mind the character was always more unstable than this: in the text, the very scene which retains the white-face even in 2015 sees her break into Xhosa as she turns on Pa Ubu from the screen.  So perhaps Ma Ubu is a more disturbing figure than a simple portrait of callow Afrikaaner women - perhaps she is also representative of how the black population could become complicit in its own oppression.  Seen like this, the decision of the 2015 production to take her out of white-face is a very bold, radical step.  

If, as Jane Taylor implies, the revival looks at 1997 from the perspective of 2015, and allows us to regard the events of that time (including the play) in the light of what has followed, then it needs to take on the emergence of a new black elite, massively wealthy and operating in close cahoots with the white plutocracy and global capitalism.  Alongside this, there persists a deep and enduring wealth gap, with the bulk of the South African population still living in poverty, their lot seemingly just the same as it was under apartheid.  The changing face of Ma Ubu confronts that appalling reality, and her voyage into the sunset with the exonerated white oppressor is all the more chilling as a result.

In a few weeks, I shall be going to South Africa myself, to begin working with Eugene Skeef on our new piece about the end of apartheid.  It feels very timely indeed.  

Exhibit B: a response to the closure

An Image from Exhibit B

It's a tense and troubled time for those of us involved in intercultural performance.  On Monday, I was invited to attend a public meeting at Stratford Circus to discuss the controversy over Brett Bailey's piece Exhibit B, opening the next night at the Vaults.  I replied by saying that I was more than willing to join the debate, but I'd rather do so after seeing the production for myself, which was due to happen tonight.  Now that the protests have brought about the production's closure, it seems I won't get the opportunity.  This means that anything I say about this work is based on conjecture and surmise rather than on experience and critical engagement.  That much at least I have in common with the protestors who shut down the work: most of them have not seen it either.

I do, however, have some knowledge of Brett Bailey as an artist, and of the company he leads - Third World Bunfight.  I saw their production of Big Dada (dealing, comically and disturbingly, with Idi Amin), and the truly astonishing celebration of spirituality and anarchy that was iMumbo Jumbo.  I have read the other plays and commentaries in Bailey's book, The Plays of Miracle and Wonder.  Only last week, I saw his stunning re-imagining of Verdi's Macbeth at the Barbican - a production which uses two icons of European culture (Shakespeare and opera) to address the ongoing neo-colonial incursions into Africa, and to represent the horrific conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the direct result of imperial history and current Western rapacity.  In this Macbeth, the witches are the forces of international capital, offering material rewards to the nascent dictator in return for purchase on the natural wealth of the land - above all the coltan used in phones and computers.  I have spent valuable and productive time in the company of Brett Bailey, and that of Abey Xakwe (a frequent leading performer with Bunfight), discussing these productions in relation to the wider cultural and political discourse.  We've talked about my own work too.  We've swapped the occasional email.  We don't know each other well - but I recognise a fellow traveller on the rocky road of a politically and spiritually engaged intercultural theatre when I see one.  So, whatever else might be said about Exhibit B (and, as I say, I haven't seen it) - it will have been a considered and serious piece of work.  It will most certainly not have been the sensationalist and self-promoting circus that its detractors have portrayed.

Exhibit B

We have to acknowledge that the anger is real.  Its main focus seems to be on the fact that the production draws off the history of the 19th century "human zoos", where black African people were shown to Europeans as sub-human curiosities.  As I understand it, the piece develops that idea into the present day, with figures like asylum seekers being similarly framed.  It sounds to me like a powerful and striking way to undercut the prevailing media discourse around such people, and around the gaze of the dominant culture.  "Look", it would seem to say: "the human zoo still exists.  This is how Africa is treated in our own time."  If that is its meaning, then it would seem to be the very opposite of racist.

But the detractors suggest that the presentation of such images, even in an artistic context, is inherently racist.  Their argument seems to be that representing the human zoo is equivalent to being the human zoo.  And that is deeply problematic.  Because if we are to equate the artistic representation of something with its actuality, then we are not able to deal with anything in art beyond flowers and teddy bears.  I don't honestly think that the people who oppose Exhibit B believe this.  The controversy has tended to couple their reaction to the "human zoo" with the fact that Brett Bailey is a white South African - and I suspect that this may be the more important strand.  Who represents?  Who has the right to represent?  Who is being addressed in that representation?  These seem to me to be the underlying issues.  Perhaps what is genuinely discomforting about Exhibit B is that the perceived hierarchy of white director and black performers could be seen to perpetuate racial hierarchies and divisions - particularly if the audience is also predominantly white (and, at Macbeth last week, it was).  After all, Twelve Years a Slave was very graphic in its representation of slavery and racial violence, but nobody called for the film to be banned.  But this was the work of a black director.  There's a good (and by no means uncritical) essay about this aspect of Bailey's exhibits by Nathanael M. Vlachos - click here.  A key point that Vlachos makes is that the black performers look out of the tableaux at the audience with great intensity, deliberately inverting and subverting the conventional gaze.  It is the white spectator who is "on view" and made the object of scrutiny in this work.

I acknowledge the problem of "the white director".  Indeed, I live with it on a daily basis.  I accept that the horrors of colonial history and the neo-colonial present will have a different emotional impact on those people whose ancestors were slaves from those whose ancestors were slave-owners.  But that does not mean that only black people can talk about this.  Indeed, I would argue that it makes it essential that everybody talks about it, and that the conversation is had between races and cultures, so as to find a way of dealing with this divisive history and jointly exploring a way to move forward.  To bar any one group of artists from engaging with such subjects on the grounds of their ethnic origin seems to me far more problematic than anything they might or might not say.

While I, and the rest of the London audience, have been denied the opportunity to see this work and engage with it directly, I do know a number of people who saw it in Edinburgh.  Lyn Gardner's response is worth a look...  So is Amy Bonsall's.  Dione Joseph, who critiques performance from a non-white perspective, was disturbed by the piece, and particularly by the element of silence.  She did not like the fact that nobody spoke - either performers or audience.  Not having experienced it, I'm unsure: the silence might perhaps give a sense of black performers and critical audiences being silenced - it might equally create a powerful metaphor of oppression and a space for deep personal contemplation, even for mourning.  What I can say with certainty is this: that on this occasion, the voices that shout loudest have been allowed to triumph, and have silenced both artistic expression and critical response.  It suggests that, in a world dominated by the media clamour, there is no space for that silence that is far more profound than noise.

The Author's Voice / Gaze

Our old friend Mahesh Dattani (pictured) is in London.  My work with him in India was what led to Border Crossings being established in the first place, and his play Bravely Fought the Queen was one of our first productions.  More recently, he was involved as a dramaturg on Re-Orientations.  So it's always a good thing to meet up with him.  Oddly enough, he was speaking yesterday at a conference for Kings College, and the other person on the panel was the South African writer Craig Higginson.  Craig's play Dream of the Dog was one of the pieces I discussed with Janet Suzman the other day - he's a really important voice in modern SA.

What was wonderful about their conversation was the way they overturned the conventional wisdom doled out to writers (and other artists, actually) to "write from experience", to "write what you know".  Writing about yourself, Craig argued, is narcissistic.  Making work about people who are somehow foreign to you, people who are different, is what stretches the writer, and so will stretch the audience.  It requires imagination and empathy.  It moves us out of the comfort zone.

Mahesh agreed completely.  To his way of thinking, there's been far too much concentration on something called a "voice" in the critical discussion of artists.  If we concentrate on finding a "voice", we become limited.  Both of these writers try to do something different, and to sound different, every time they make a new play.  What Mahesh felt was more important than the writer's voice was the writer's gaze - how a writer sees and hears the world.  Much of writing, much of creativity, is actually not to do with making things at all.  It's to do with absorbing things and responding to them.  That's why neither Mahesh nor Craig is didactic in political terms.  As Mahesh said: "It's not my politics that shape my writing - it's my writing that's shaped my politics."

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The other topic I've been wanting to blog about is not really related to this - but I want to say it anyway.    What has got into opera managements?  I went to see Julius Caesar at the ENO the other night. It's not great.  As so often recently, this was an opera directed by somebody who doesn't direct operas.  In this case, it's a choreographer (a very good one, I may add - but not someone who knows this form).  There have also been film directors, documentary makers, actors, conductors and administrators.  Having directed an opera before seems to be an actual disadvantage in this area.  If Madonna wanted to direct an opera, she could - it would be a press story, right?

What's so odd, and so insulting about this, is that nobody would ever dream of hiring such people to conduct the opera, or to sing it, or play the violin.  Somehow the art of the director is still regarded as the preserve of the imaginative amateur.  Nobody seems to have noticed that it helps to know what you're doing.

I once heard one of these amateurs comment that she could direct opera because she'd been going to see operas for many years.  Well, I've been on a lot of planes.  That doesn't make me a pilot.

Janet Suzman

Last night saw the last of our talks on African theatre, which, like the first one back in May, was co-presented with Chickenshed, alongside their production of The Rain that Washes.  Janet Suzman is a "Founding Patron" of Chickenshed, so it was a great chance for me to interview her for 45 minutes.

If only it had been longer.  While Janet is incredibly famous in the UK as a classical actor, and has had the odd brush with Hollywood as well, very few people know about her work in South Africa.  But that is actually the most exciting bit.  As she said in our chat, there is something about the country of her birth that has kept pulling her back throughout her life; and there is something about countries in crisis, countries which have been invaded, and countries very much in the process of becoming that makes their theatre vital and immediate.

We talked about her early years, her growing awareness of injustice, and her family's involvement in the struggle - Helen Suzman was her aunt.  We talked about her breaking of Equity's cultural boycott to direct John Kani in Othello at the Market Theatre - she got permission from the ANC in exile, who agreed that Shakespeare was a protest playwright - and in any case, she suggested, the boycott played right into the hands of the regime as it meant there were no dissenting voices in the public arena.  We talked about her adaptation of The Cherry Orchard as The Free State - an extraordinary celebration of the end of apartheid.

Today, The Free State perhaps feels unduly optimistic.  But, as Janet said, it encapsulated the spirit of a moment, the euphoria that greeted Mandela's election.  Almost twenty years later, laws from the apartheid era are being used by a black President to justify the shooting of striking miners.  This isn't the Rainbow Nation which the play eagerly expected.  And so we talked about what a revival today could mean - how the cold wind of the future might blow through the falling trees.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day

We had an amazing day on Saturday, kicking off an exciting new partnership with Chickenshed.  As Dave Carey said in his introduction to the day, it's odd that we should be on this theatre's doorstep, and it took an Australian living in Wales to put us in touch - but thanks to Ian McKenzie-Thurley for seeing the commonalities of interest.  We're all very keen that this relationship should grow.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day was a one-day festival of Southern African culture, held at Chickenshed to complement their play The Rain that Washes, and curated by us.  It's amazing just how much you can cram into one day, if you set your mind to it.  The morning saw two storytelling sessions for children, with Nyemu and Wedzi of World Musik Makers - a Zulu couple who are wonderfully charismatic, and incredibly committed to African culture.  Nyemu tells me that they are now letting out their house in Cambridgeshire to pay for the transportation of equipment to the school they support in Zimbabwe. 

The afternoon started with Idrissa Ouedraogo's film Kini and Adams - a brilliant piece of work which shows relationships collapsing as a mining operation shifts the aspirations of a community.  There was a pretty strong discussion after that - and an even more powerful one in the panel session, Theatre for a Change.  I chaired this, with Arifani Moyo from the Indigeneity project, Christopher Maphosa (on whose life The Rain that Washes is based) and Kate Stafford from Bilimankhwe, who has herself been blogging about the day!  The discussion moved between theatre and politics, theatre for development, theatre and prison, theatre for and by children (in particular CHIPAWO in Zimbabwe), and to the very heart of the post-colonial debate.  It was particularly exciting for us to have the South African High Commissioner, Dr. Z.S.T. Skweyiya, and his wife in the room, and contributing very robustly to the debate.  There was also Dr. Ralph Mguni, the Secretary General of ZAPU, who is awaiting the fall or death of Mugabe before he returns to his Zimbabwean home.  Ralph spoke towards the end of our discussions, and made very clear the importance of cultural activism in the development of the post-colonial space.  For an organisation like ours, working at the interface between intercultural theatre and international policy, this was an inspiring afternoon.

The play, written by Dave Carey with Christopher Maphosa, and performed by Ashley Maynard (pictured) is a solo piece dealing with Christopher's own journey with ZAPU, which took him to Bulgaria with Joshua Nkomo, in preparation for the liberation of Zimbabwe, and then into a nightmare of oppression after the election of Mugabe.  Christopher came to England as a refugee, and his story again underlines the importance of cultural work with refugee communities - it was through working at Chickenshed that he once again found himself a home.  The theatre was packed, and the audience excited!

As if all that wasn't enough, we ended the day with a jazz concert from the great South African trumpeter Claude Deppa.  How exciting was that?

Truth and Reconciliation

debbie tucker green's new play at the Royal Court is a brilliant piece of work. I've always liked her writing - stoning mary was another beautiful play - but this time she combines her characteristic poetic language and provocative stance with an amazing manipulation of space which makes the play speak with great immediacy. When you first enter the room, the audience chairs are distributed around the playing area (theatre-in-the-round, basically). You have to choose where to sit with care. A lot of the chairs have reserved notices on them - often saying things like "Victim's Family" or "Witnesses" - which lead you to believe they will be used in the performance, although in fact many are not. Every chair has the name of a victim from a recent conflict carved onto the seat. The chair I sat on had the name and dates of a little girl from Bosnia, killed in her first decade. It was, to say the least, discomforting. On Friday night, there were also surtitles for the hard of hearing, so another factor around justice and its relationship to where you sit came into play.

What was so exciting about all of this was how it blended into the performance itself. The first line referred to the hardness of the chairs for the families coming to a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The mother of a victim felt unable to sit in the room while she waited for the perpetrators. How people sat in relation to one another, how this reflects power structures and power struggles, became integral to the performance. There's been much talk of the theatricality of such events - and now the links were made explicit, implicating us as an audience in the reality of the political and moral crises under exploration.

Only two characters ever got to sit in the centre of the stage - and they were both ghosts. A Rwandan man and the South African child whose mother refused to take a chair. They were evoked to speak to those who had killed them, those whom they haunted, those who knew exactly how they died. But, even at the centre of the stage, they could not speak directly to those they had left behind and who were desperate for knowledge of them.

Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking

Ben Evans at Oval House has brought a show over from South Africa - I was at the Press Night yesterday. The company is Magnet Theatre from Cape Town. The play has a wonderful title - Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking - and that title is horribly appropriate to the theme of displaced people. As the richest country on the African continent (though I bet that's sometimes pretty hard to remember in Soweto), South Africa is the goal for most African refugees. I'd heard quite a lot about the Zimbabwean exodus to South Africa: the characters in this play come from a Francophone country - it's not specified which one.

And, in a way, that's my concern about the piece. It's very sympathetic in its portrayal of refugees, and it's very theatrical - but the characters are just refugees... we don't know from what, or from where, or how the political or cultural or social meltdown which displaced them occurred. And so the play becomes sentimental - it doesn't allow us to be moved to action, only to pity. It doesn't allow us to feel in any way implicated. And we are.

Because of this, all the theatricality (and there's lots, and it's impressive) doesn't really work for me. It's not in the service of real storytelling - it looks whizzkidding. I probably would be more positive about it, except that I've been studying a lot of work about refugees recently for a new MA Module I'm creating for Rose Bruford, and I've come to feel that contextualising the stories, as well as allowing the refugees to be heard, is crucial. The best example is Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravanserail. When I met her, she said that play was "A punch on the nose. For everybody."

Africa looming large

Lots of African events in the last few days. We've been talking to the Africa Centre, where we did Toufann, as a possible central London venue for Dilemma. Graeme Jennings, who is running it on a temporary basis as it recovers from deficits, is rebuilt etc, invites me to its Arts and Culture Advisory Panel meeting, and I end up as part of the panel. There are some fascinating other people on it: Tessa from Africa Beyond, Netsayi Chigwendere, Zina Sar-Wiwa, and Adrian Berry, who programmed some of our work into the Bull at Barnet years ago. Adrian has done a draft programme for how the venue might function once it's re-built: in the meantime, we're talking about performing in its decaying shell. I like this idea for this play - it's a piece which demands the roughness and immediacy of traditional African performance, and where the sense of a decaying history, of ghosts, will be very helpful indeed.

Last night Kate Stafford and I drove up to Birmingham to see the Drum, where Dilemma will perform in Birmingham, and to attend the launch of UK Arts' Africa Consortium. It's a great idea - and displays the huge interest which the UK has in African work now. I find myself wondering what's at the root of this: post-colonial guilt, or a real sense that a continent which lives more closely with nature and at a saner pace might be able to teach us something? John Kani, who is the Consortium's Patron, suggests the latter in his speech. "When you come to Africa, come with an empty suitcase.... we are teachers as well".

The launch coincides with the press night of his play Nothing but the Truth at the Rep. In the programme, Zakes Mda (who knows a thing or two about this) says that the play is a milestone in South African theatre, and that it shows that Kani really is a fine writer - overturning the myth that it was really Fugard who wrote The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead. I'm quite sure that John Kani and Winston Ntshona fed a hige amount into those plays - they were genuine devised collaborations, like lots of what we do - but that doesn't make them great playwrights on their own, and to my mind this play showed it. I couldn't see how the family tiff was supposed to connect to the politics. I found the Ibsenite naturalism, unearthing past secrets, creaky and obvious. And so Western - box set and all. Kani is a wonderful actor and a great ambassador for African theatre, but this play shows him receiving Western models wholesale and then sending them back, long out of fashion and looking a bit bedraggled. I suppose it may be part of a malaise that I've been told has gripped many South African theatre-makers in the years since apartheid ended: the sense that there is no focus any more. One thing which did feel very resonant in the play was the way Kani's own character felt washed up and abandoined in the new South Africa - still, in his early 60s, unable to rise to the post of Chief Librarian. As if the generation that did all the suffering and all the campaigning has just been left behind.

It makes it poignant to compare this with the revival of Sizwe Banzi at the Barbican, with Peter Brook's company. Two young African actors perform this with virtuoso brilliance - particularly Habib Dembele in the John Kani role. The opening monologue (which is well known as Kani's own work - based on his experiences at Ford and developed through the stand-up like experience of performing the play in the townships) feels very alive, very current and incredibly funny. Because it is so concrete - because the politics and the human experience are the same thing - this play continues to resonate right now.