Ubu and the Truth Commission (The Print Room)

Pa Ubu pops up everywhere. The scatalogical horror, who dispatched his enemies with a wave of his shit-flecked loo brush in Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu Roi, is a manifestation of the worst in us. Often he stands in for dictators, those whose absolute power runs away with them, but given the chance, any one of us could be an Ubu.

Handspring, who created the puppets in War Horse, have found him lurking in South Africa. In their version (written by Jane Taylor), first seen in 1997, he is heading up of one of Eugene de Kock’s death squads that kidnapped and killed so many protestors against Apartheid. And to think: Ma Ubu (Busi Zokufa) always figured he was off having affairs. This, at least, she can forgive.

Stood onstage in only his skimpies, David Minnaar isn’t quite the grotesque horror Jarry concocted – too tame, too sober. Facing the Truth and Reconciliation Commisssion, established to recriminate for the wrongs of the National Party’s regime, his Ubu tries to squirm away from justice, dispatching documents into a paper-swallowing crocodile and stitching up his troops – a three-headed Cerberus puppet – to hang for his orders. Eventually, he takes to the stand to lie for his life, and even the microphones rebel. One turns away. Another takes a swing at him.

One by one, Adrian Kohler‘s puppets – their faces wizened wood carvings – testify to the violence they have incurred under Ubu. They are object people, handled with care for the first time in their lives. Overhead, director William Kentridge‘s scratchy black and white animations portray the abuse meted out: black silhouettes hanging by their feet; eyeballs and fingernails and flesh. Photographs flash past, bodies in gutters, in trees, in pools of blood. Spidery cameras scuttle around on tripod legs.

These should be potent images and yet there’s next to no charge or feeling. Everything is illustrative, where it ought to be an indictment. Taylor’s text is florid and stewed, where it needs to be plain-speaking, and the story is muddied not enlightened by metaphor. It’s a contextual problem in part: what might be readily apparent in South Africa is less clear over here.

Besides all this is nearly 20 years old and too often it shows. The stagecraft has long since been surpassed – not so much Kohler’s puppets or Kentridge’s animation in themselves, but in their scrappy, sketchy, scene-change-after-scene-change combination. Testimonies that must have felt unbearably raw while the commission was ongoing, of men dragged around in tyres and burned alive, have lost their sting over time. Scar tissue is never as sensitive as an open wound.

So why revive Ubu and the Truth Commission now? True, it chimes with rising nationalism across Europe, and with David Cameron’s recent dismissal of slavery reparations, and we must never forget the lessons of history. ("High tides may vary," one slogan runs, "but low tide returns to the same mark.") It is, however, left to us to reach for such associations. Handspring make nothing of them, preferring to preserve the piece as it was rather than tweak it – theatre as taxidermy, basically.

Ubu and the Truth Commission runs at the Print Room until 7th November