HATCHED by Mamela Nyamza and UBU AND THE TRUTH COMMISSION by Jane Taylor (Canadian Stage). Presented as part of Spotlight South Africa at the Berkeley Street Theatre (26 Berkeley). Runs to April 19 see website for details. $30-$99. 416-368-3110, canadianstage.com. Rating: Hatched NNN Ubu NNNN
A second double bill of South African shows presented by Canadian Stage explores the countrys past and present.
Just as in last weeks The Meal, choreographer/dancer Mamela Nyamza is front and centre in Hatched. But while The Meal explores the colonization of a people and its culture, Hatched focuses on a woman caught between personal and societal demands.
In both pieces, Nyamza blends western classical ballet and native dance. With her naked back to the audience, she makes her way across the stage en pointe and in a white tutu-like skirt, clothespins attached to it. Initially balancing red clothes on her head, she hangs them in a clothesline that stretches across the stage we hear village sounds, including song snatches and cowbells.
The clothesline is a kind of snare, tethering her to the domestic world, while a young man (Amkele Mandla) her characters son? paints a canvas on the floor. Eventually, wrapping a huge red skirt around herself and achieving independence from the line, Nyamza engages in an internal debate, some of which is quietly voiced to the audience.
Is she sorting out her desires and goals as mother, woman and artist? Removing the trappings of western culture, she performs a native dance with joy and pride. Her dancing and energy are remarkable, but Hatched isnt as resonant or clearly articulated as The Meal.
If Hatched doesnt reveal enough, Ubu And The Truth Commission, which is striking in so many ways, makes its point too often.
Written by Jane Taylor and directed by visual artist William Kentridge in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, the show looks at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to try to bring together the countrys previously antagonistic sides, divided by apartheid. Blended with testimonies of torture is the figure of Ubu Roi, an egotistic, evasive tyrant created over a century ago by French dramatist Alfred Jarry, who here becomes the key figure investigated by the commission.
Pa Ubu (Dawid Minnaar) is out each night participating in devilries against black citizens, but his wife (Busi Zokufa) thinks hes having an affair. In fact, what he showers off himself nightly isnt the smell of another woman but rather the violence associated with explosives, blood and body parts, as we witness in Kentridges extraordinary animation projected behind the live action.
One of Kentridges unforgettable images is a sequence of violent acts committed in a series of rooms the camera pulls back to reveal a huge building filled with death and destruction.
In addition to the couples broad Punch-and-Judy antics, we see Ubus assistants, who come to life as fascinating puppets: Brutus, a dog whose body is a small suitcase and whose three heads (worked and voiced by Gabriel Marchand, Mongi Mthombeni and Mandiseli Maseti) suggest Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld, and a crocodile named Niles, who swallows the evidence of Ubus horrific secrets.
There are other puppets, too, human figures with wonderfully expressive faces who recount the actual horrors faced by those mown down by government forces. The several figures testify in their native tongue, translated by other actors in the shower, whose water hose becomes a microphone.
That shower resonates cleverly in all sorts of ways: you might think of the glass booth in which arrested Nazi Adolph Eichmann testified to his part in the Holocaust, or the showers of deadly gas faced by Holocaust victims. Newsreels of bodies and massacres in South Africa underline the genocidal parallels.
Many of those who committed atrocities were given lenient sentences by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a point made in the show. Even Ubu gets off, though the very microphones into which he speaks during his testimony rise up against his lies.
The production is first rate, but at times it goes on longer than necessary to demonstrate the awfulness of the white regime. Maybe thats intentional the horrors never seem to end but in dramatic terms, we understand the lesson long before its over.
Still, Ubu And The Truth Commission is haunting, exceptional theatre.
