Testimony and Theater: The Controversy of Truth-Telling in Post-Apartheid South Africa and Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

Abstract

“Theatre is the ambitious sister of Testimony,” Desmond Tutu claims in the Foreword to Yael Farber’s Theatre as Witness: Three Testimonial Plays from South Africa. “It strives to heal through truth,” offering a controversial form of storytelling that has emerged in drama movements throughout South Africa and Northern Ireland.¹ Re-structuring “random facts and details into a trajectory from which a powerful theatre experience can emerge,” testimony’s “ambitious sister,” demands that an audience engage with the performativity of truth in ways that testimony cannot. In Yael Farber’s He Left Quietly² and Brian Campbell’s Des,³ audiences are asked to consider the role of truth-telling in societies emerging from decades of conflict. Lives are broken, politics have failed and violence has reigned supreme. But suddenly this reality, to which everyday citizens have become accustomed, stops. People are asked to forgive and move on, to put down arms and somehow reengage with the symbolism of politics as a means of expression.