Zachary Lamdin

Improper Laughter?: Performing Contention in Theatre of Reconciliation

Paying particular attention to the example of South Africa’s transition to multi-racial democracy, this paper will offer an intervention in the dialogue between performance and political reconciliation. This paper reflects on my own encounter with a video-taped performance of Ubu and the Truth Commission, and specifically the unexpected occurrence of (improper?) audience laughter during one of the play’s verbatim accounts of brutal violence. Whilst this is probably the most widely discussed play to deal with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this contentious irruption of laughter has been elided from critical accounts of the play in performance. This paper will ask why, suggesting that the performance event as experienced does not fit the critical narratives constructed about this play, and theatre of reconciliation more generally; that is, that such performances invoke publics collectively bearing witness to trauma. Bringing together scholarship on political reconciliation and performance studies, this paper will attempt to unsettle the claims about traumatic realism and performances of bearing witness that are made by post-traumatic readings of theatre of reconciliation. Drawing on Nicholas Ridout’s discussion of accidental laughter as constituting ‘ruptures in the representational operations of theatrical impersonation,’ I will suggest that the potential for a truly political reconciliation exists in the ruptures opened when publics perform their own unscripted – and unexpected – challenges to traumatic realism, such as in the contentious irruption of improper laughter.