Seeing and Time: Durational Time in Ubu and the Truth Commission and Long Night’s Journey into Day

Abstract

Libin analyses two performative texts, William Kentridge and Jane Taylor’s play, Ubu and the Truth Commission, and Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann’s documentary film, Long Night’s Journey into Day, both of which are concerned with the TRC amnesty hearings. Arguing that the performative nature of both texts allows him to consider time as an affective structure, Libin utilizes Lawrence L. Langer’s concept of the “durational time” of trauma to analyse the play and documentary. Libin contends that whereas Ubu and the Truth Commission represents the recurrence of trauma through alienating theatrical devices that subjects its audience to temporal suspension, Long Night’s Journey enacts what Langer describes as the desire to restore the traumatic subject to chronological time; to bring the traumatic event to a conclusion and restore both normality and meaning.